64th VENICE FILM-FEST RAISES DEBATES
Venice, September 8, 2007 --- Goodbye fairytales, goodbye happy endings, no more heroes riding into the sunset
leaving audiences dreaming of gilded tomorrows. Judging by the 64th Venice Film Festival the future is grim, society has climbed the
pinnacle of materialism, the individual is ‘corporatized’, morally bankrupt, ego-driven, divided between the have-its and the have-
nots, one side xenophobic the other desperate and restless.
People are judged on status symbols, on what they are not who they are. Of all the human emotions greed percolates
through most films, sex is mechanical, executed with brutal violence upon women or with contortionist techniques; justice can not be
expected from a corrupt authority but only by popular revolt; the system is rotten and humanity gasps for survival like the carp,
disemboweled, scaled and served up alive to admiring diners, its mouth still opening and closing as it draws the final whiffs of oxygen in
the opening sequence of Jiang Wen’s ‘The Sun Also Rises.’
Wen’s symbolism of modern society is poetic. Others, like British veteran Ken Loach, portray the erosion of
morality and decency more realistically. Loach’s film “It’s a Free World� is a parody of workers without tenure and union
protection, workers who become predators of their own kind in a world where the stronger eat the weaker where bullies end up exploiting
the most vulnerable, in this case illegal immigrants, with the same soulless brutality we attribute to multinationals but which is now common
practice among individual entrepreneurs.
The linear story telling of old are lost in plots that are no plots but often a confetti of images rained upon the audience,
a cascade catering to the eye rather then the mind and leaving the audience with their own interpretations. Some, like Jose Luis Guerinâ
€™s film “In Sylvia’s Cityâ€� have virtually no dialogue, yet no one can miss the story of a young man searching for a girl he
once saw as symbolic for our search for an ideal we never find.
One lesson from the Venice film-fest is that good films, films that analyze and have a message, do not require huge
budgets or blockbuster status.
One film that had nothing of importance to say was the winner of the Golden Lion award, Venice’s equivalent to an
Oscar. Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s erotic espionage thriller ‘Lust, Caution� is a film set in the Shanghai of the 1940s with a
plot designed for box office success, with no message except an appeal to the senses below the navel.
The jury, perhaps embarrassed by choosing yet another Chinese film for the third successive year ( a choice booed by
the audience) awarded a special golden lion prize to ‘12’, a film directed by Russia’s veteran film maker Nikita Mikhalkov. A
clear favorite of critics and audiences ‘12’ is a small budget film with a riveting plot. A jury is told to bring in a quick guilty verdict on
a Chechen youth who allegedly stabbed to death his adoptive father, a Russian military officer. But one dissenting juror argues: “Let
us at least simply talk about it.�
In the school gym where the jury deliberates the film becomes a caricature of a Russia haunted by fear of Chechen
terrorists and prejudices against outsiders, just as the West today is paranoid about Islamic terrorists and immigrants.
Mikhalkov not only dissects the alleged crime but Russian society. He sprinkles his vivisection of the crime with
episodes from the life of the jurors, episodes that expose their prejudices, their dark moments, experiences which have influenced their
way of judging others. He exposes the corruption and mafia system of a Russia and suggests in the end common people may have to
take the law once again into their own hands because the system has no intention to reform itself.
The same theme of a popular uprising runs through Youssef Chahine’s Egyptian saga ‘Heya Fawda’ (Chaos)
which begins like an Arab soap opera but ends with an unusual call for protest against the prepotency of villainous Egyptian officials who
hide their excesses behind the ever ready excuse: ‘It is in the national interest.’
No one reflects society’s changes better then Ken Loach in “It’s a Free World.’ In the past the old
master has often held a tell-tale mirror to society. This time he illustrates through the story of one London woman how job insecurity,
corporate exploitation and the ardent desire to ‘have it all’ drives an ordinary person to exploit others after having been exploited
first.
Realistic films like ‘It’s a Free World’ show the successful 21st century Homo sapiens is a ruthless predator
chasing an endless nirvana of high-tech toys, drugs, strobe lights and four-wheel drives. The species is cloistered into walled
compounds, electronically protected inside and by paid vigilantes outside. Inside their cocoon this modern species sniffs coke and pumps
shrill tech music to stimulate a sex drive as mechanical as eating or drinking. Outside in the shanty towns, the favelas, the slums and new
carton cities of the ‘developing’ world revolt festers among the rich man’s garbage heaps.
No surprise the most dramatic cinematic exposes of human cruelty come from countries in the center of this transition:
American film-makers denouncing the inhumanity of their soldiers in the Middle East. (Paul Haggis ‘Valley of Elah’ and Brian de
Palma ‘Redacted’ – see attached story and ‘The Man from Plains, Jonathan Demme’s portrait of Jimmy Carter criticizing
Israel’s policy – see attached story).
Mexican director Rodrigo Pla points the finger at the luxury urban enclaves in the third world, walled in compounds for
the rich with their own laws, their own vigilante groups committing murders protected by crooked police. In his chilling film ‘La Zona’
Pla exposes the escalating paranoia of those in the enclaves, the luxury cocoons protected by sophisticated high-tech gadgetry. Their
fear of the enemy outside on which we are nurtured each day can turn them into vicious murderers and ardent supporters of savage wars
like those today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.
In Pla’s film the violence born of fear stomps to death a thief who dared breach the security wall.
Brutality in sex appears to be a sure recipe for commercial success this year.
Each year the scenes are more explicit. Soon we should be able to view pure hardcore, we’re almost there. This yearâ
€™s menu concocts new sex acrobatics, contortions of limbs worthy of a circus act or the Kama Sutra coupled with faked submission like
in Ang Lee’s movie Lust and Caution. Chain rape and carnal barbarity in Alexey Balabanov’s film ‘Gruz 200’ reflects not
only the trend of violence against women but the disintegrating Soviet system in the 1980s. In those days coffins were returning from
Afghanistan and the Soviets tried to hide them.
Even in Joe Wright’s sensitive film Atonement, about a little girl’s revenge for a rejected love, the one love scene
had to be crucified against the bookshelves in the library.
As for blood and gore, the other apparent box office success formula, the latest sanguine epic, REC, comes from Spain and
is a parody of the human species destined to be gobbled up by some kind of runaway virus bred in a laboratory, accidentally released
and transmitted by saliva. The virus converts the infected into ravaging cannibals eating each other like jackals. Not a pretty sight, a
fodder for ghouls, so vivid the audience can only gasp.
For the extreme connoisseur of twisted plots the festival offered “Misgotten� by Joao Canijo, a script of incest, fatal
abortion, patricide, more incest, another patricide and finally a matricide. In the end we are told all this happened because the girl felt
depressed ever since her father bedded the sister and not her. More twisted even: The film was shown to the two prisoners allowed each
year under guard to visit the festival for two screenings.
One would have thought, just like the Golden Lion award, the choice was not an appropriate one, either for prisoners being
reformed or for audiences starving for something better then TV –style soap operas.
Ends