Venice 2022: All the Spit and the Spectacle
On 10 days of cinema, cultural "collapse," and the occasional controversy.
Buongiorno! No one wanted to pay to write a festival dispatch out of Venice this year, one of my favorite forms of writing, so you luck out and get it delivered directly to your inbox.
It might be for the best that I didn’t get a dispatch commission, given that I usually need to have at minimum four films I didn’t review elsewhere to write up. (Apologies for the writing “inside baseball,” but I’m always shocked that quite a few people want to know these things.) After mainlining a whopping 37 films last year, I “only” managed 24 in 2022 and missed three of the biggest prizewinners: Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, and Jafar Panahi’s No Bears.
So yeah, I didn’t have much time for pure pleasure watching this year. But, then again, the filmmakers did not seem to have much time for pleasure either. Festival heartthrob Timothée Chalamet might have said it best in the Bones and All press conference:
At the 2022 Venice Film Festival, there was but a single film I watched without the knowledge that I’d be paid for my thoughts on it. This would be Kôji Fukada’s Love Life, which more or less summed up the general tenor of Venice’s films: grim portraits of people trying to connect and fumble forward amidst catastrophic loss. Very post-pandemic, insomuch as that’s a thing. After a couple loses their son Keita in a freak accident, the parents seek unconventional solace. While the child’s stepfather Jiro entertains moving on with a new and more emotionally available partner, his mother Taeko seeks the closest thing to Keita: his biological father Park. Her ex-husband is abusive, yes, but his deafness and homelessness make this Korean loner adrift in Japan a natural vessel for her maternal instincts.
I found Fukada’s film to wallow in sentimentality a little too much to be fully effective, especially because his previous two films (the highly commendable Harmonium and A Girl Missing — the latter of which I interviewed him about) are so unsparing in their assessments of human emotion. But it nonetheless asks an important question that stuck with me: can we ever successfully turn back to the past when it feels like our future has been taken away from us?
It’s a point that apparently a number of filmmakers in this year’s Venice lineup were contemplating. One film, Bill Pohlad’s Dreamin’ Wild, found a true tonic by finding a path forward for its depiction of Donnie & Joe Emerson. The brotherly musical duo puts out a record in the late ‘70s that never quite found an audience in its time, only to find out decades later that vinyl enthusiasts discovered and devoured their album. (It slaps.) Their redemption tour prompts turmoil between the siblings as Donnie wants to recapture a lost career while Joe desires to double down on what worked well in the first place.
There’s pain in sorting out their competing needs, but the film soaringly posits that harmony is possible. This might have been the only film in the lineup I saw that I could reasonably be called “uplifting,” and it does so without resorting to saccharine scripting. Keep an eye out for this one when it gets distribution and a release date.
Among the films that attempted doubling down on the past from an artistic perspective (rather than in their narratives), the festival selections showed mixed results. Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo showed two filmmakers spinning their wheels so rapidly as to give the appearance of motion. The latter film so earned my ire that it got me quoted in Vulture (and I believe has earned me a subtweet from a notable writer to which I am going to be mature and not clap back at). A friend pointed out I’m also the only flat negative review of Bardo on Metacritic, so watch this space as my reputation as a true hater could get interesting!
Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener and Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Gardner, on the other hand, found new ways for the filmmakers to return to pet themes and recurring fascinations without growing stale. The two aforementioned titles each complete a trilogy of sorts in their own way, and they do so by finding new avenues of expression that cast the previous entries in exciting new lights.
But the three most exciting films of the festival for me — Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, Romain Gavras’ Athena, and Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All — found their filmmakers working in formats and frameworks that felt entirely new.
McDonagh is the king of quippy Irish comedy; here, he extends himself for a civil war allegory that is both hilarious and truly heart-rending. It’s the kind of film that makes you feel down on humanity — not because everything is lost, but because there’s something worth saving.
Gavras’ previous two features are about angry young men trying to claim some place for themselves in a cutthroat world; here, he makes a visually propulsive war film about civilians taking up arms against the cops controlling their community. The film’s visceral single-shot scenes plunge us into the moral morass of a situation spiraling even more out of control by the minute, forcing us to feel the conundrums of the characters rather than intellectually ponder them.
Guadagnino’s traditional operating mode is one of ironic detachment; here, this cannibal love story is more nakedly sincere than in his previous works. Yes, even the Timothée Chalamet star-making vehicle Call Me By Your Name in all its weepy wonders. The director takes his traditional position by (at least I believe — and argue more full-throatedly in my review) layering queer subtext on top of the heterosexual romance. It’s fascinating to watch this daring juxtaposition unfold over a YA-based story.
All in all, it was another excellent year at the festival — perhaps not quite as overwhelmingly spectacular as 2021’s edition where I saw half of my top ten movies of the year in just three days. But hey, last year didn’t have a global phenomenon like Spitgate1 that had more people curious about the festival than ever before!
Now if only I could convince everyone to spend as many minutes analyzing one of the great titles in the Venice Film Festival's actual selection as they did on the millennial Zapruder film...
Here’s my official ranking of the 24 films I saw at Venice this year.
And below are the links to all the reviews I wrote. Many thanks to my editors at The Playlist, Decider, Slashfilm, and Slant for making this all possible and keeping me so busy:
I also appeared on Little White Lies’ podcast Truth and Movies to discuss the first half of the festival:
I was hoping my piece on the documentaries about cinema history would publish today, so I’ll just include it in the regular links later this week.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
The official Marshall and the Movies position is that Harry Styles did not spit; Chris Pine was simply looking down to find the sunglasses he put on to take a nap during the movie because he was astral projecting far away from the petty drama of the day.