August can be a dreary month for Hollywood glamour, but the Venice Film Festival is on the horizon to kick off the busy fall film festival season in style.
There will be plenty of stars gracing the red carpets when the 83rd edition of the festival kicks off Wednesday on the Lido: Noel and Liam Gallagher, Robert Pattinson, Rooney Mara, George Clooney and Penélope Cruz are among those expected to attend. Some of the films may even become Oscar nominees.
But the mood feels a little different this year. There will always be a spotlight for the Hollywood contingent and the awards hopefuls posing on boats and docks in designer duds. Yet, in a lineup featuring Pattinson as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen, Dakota Johnson as Marilyn Monroe, Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch and Clooney as, well, himself (he’s getting a lifetime achievement award, as is Ellen Burstyn), it’s possible that much of the attention will be on a man who (probably) won’t be there: Elon Musk.
Docs feature Musk, Russia and Gaza
Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary about the world’s richest man has been in the works for almost four years. The Oscar-winner wasn’t sure about taking it on at first, but a good friend convinced him it would be a worthy portrait of 21st-century power — and this was before the 2024 presidential campaign and DOGE.
When the documentary was announced, Musk called it a “hit piece” on social media. Gibney replied, “How would you know?”
In fact, Gibney told The Associated Press he started off as a kind of admirer — as well as a Tesla owner — and sincerely wanted to talk to Musk for the film.
“Ultimately, he didn’t want to talk to me,” Gibney said. “But then you start, you know, digging into the facts and you follow them where they lead. And where they led, for me, was to a place that upended the myth, I would say, of Elon Musk as a kind of modern Leonardo da Vinci … I think that the news in this film is that Musk isn’t an inventor. He’s a confidence man.”
The filmmakers talked to hundreds of people on and off the record to compile a sweeping picture of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO who, Gibney said, is not dissimilar to the guys at Enron or Elizabeth Holmes. He was most surprised by how many people seemed to be afraid to be on camera talking about Musk — even his admirers wanted permission first.
“I thought, wow, for such a big and powerful person, that seems awfully weak,” Gibney said.
But while it’s a “dark and dangerous topic,” Gibney said, the film is also a “fun ride.”
The same could be said of “My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile,” in which Julia Loktev continues her sprawling portrait of independent Russian journalists after the invasion of Ukraine.
“You see this group of young, very young journalists who’ve just fled their country, like, on a few hours’ notice. They had the choice of, you know, stop reporting the truth about the war, which didn’t seem like a choice at all, or go to prison, or leave the country so they can keep telling the truth,” Loktev said. “It was a question of how long do you keep following? Because this takes place over four years. And over that time, exile becomes, of course, indefinite.”
Similar to the first film, Part II runs nearly six hours. But, she said, “I hear it goes by easy.”
The conflict in Gaza will also take center stage in the documentary “NAZA,” a late addition to the competition, from two of the filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning “No Other Land.”
Unlike last year, no large-scale protests are planned, but the group Venice4Palestine did call on the festival to “suspend all agreements with entities and institutions linked to the Israeli government.” It also asked that the Palestinian flag be flown throughout.
Hollywood eyes awards in Venice
Part of the intrigue of Venice is how it might play into the Oscar race — it’s usually good for a best picture nominee or two.
Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as 1970s CIA agents, seems like a promising candidate after his last two films debuted at Venice and went on to nominations. “The Father” filmmaker Florian Zeller returns with “Bunker,” a psychological thriller with Cruz and Javier Bardem. Danny Boyle looks at a turning point in tabloid media in “Ink.” And there’s much curiosity around Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” for Pattinson’s performance and for its examination of reality television culture in the early 2000s.
Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is also debuting “Look Back,” about two small-town girls who aspire to be manga artists. And Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong examines themes of labor and freedom through two married couples in “Possible Love.”
This is also a year in which big Hollywood hasn’t needed the sheen of the international film festival. Cannes was bereft of a big blockbuster, and the industry went on to have one of its highest-earning summers ever. The reigning best picture winner, “One Battle After Another,” skipped festivals entirely.
Venice might have more Hollywood films than Cannes did, but following several years in which fates might have been prematurely decided for both would-be contenders, like “After the Hunt” and “The Smashing Machine,” and blockbusters like “Joker: Folie à Deux,” it too seems a bit more muted — at least on paper.
Venice fails in its pledge to women
And then there is the subject of women, specifically those behind the camera. There is only one in the main competition: Danish-Egyptian director May El-Toukhy. The same thing happened in 2018, prompting the festival that year to sign a pledge to have at least half of the films in competition be directed by women by 2020, which they have yet to achieve.
Adding more insult to injury is the fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose first film “The Lost Daughter” won Venice’s best screenplay prize in 2021, is presiding over a jury which includes Kaouther Ben Hania, whose film “The Voice of Hind Rajab” won the Silver Lion last year when there were six female-directed films in the competition.
Only seven women have won the Golden Lion, including Laura Poitras with “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” who is returning this year with a short film she co-directed with Rachel Lauren Mueller about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis. “They’re Here” is part of the Venice Open section, which also includes Gyllenhaal’s Marilyn Monroe short “Flesh Impact.”
Outside of the main competition, there are also documentaries from Loktev, Barbara Kopple and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. There are several others in the Horizons sections as well, including a short from Saoirse Ronan.
Opening Venice Days on Wednesday is Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát’s English-language debut, “My Notes on Mars,” about a couple — Rupert Friend and Mackenzie Davis — whose marriage is in trouble when the wife, a scientist, mysteriously disappears and then reappears the day of her memorial service.
“The story argues for great love,” Horvát said. “Yet it shows the eternal limits of knowing the person we are in love with.”
Venice Days is an independent sidebar in which more than half the selections are by women, including several high-profile shorts from filmmakers like Mona Fastvold and Claire Denis.
“It’s good to be in a progressive section,” Horvát said.
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