Venice International Film Festival: An Irish film becomes favourite to win the Golden Lion

It didn’t take long for attendees of the 80th Venice International Film Festival to tire of discussing who wasn’t there. But it kept coming up. Adam Driver and David Fincher were among those mouthing off about the actors’ strike that had kept most US stars at home. For all that, the opening week of the 2023 event felt as buzzy as ever. Woody Allen, a controversial figure, was there to introduce his new film, Coup de Chance, and to receive an apparently pointed ovation at the press conference. There may have been fewer big names over the fence that separates the red carpet from the circling hordes, but Venice once again confirmed that, of the world’s festivals, only Cannes can compete for fecundity.

Not that every film was of the highest quality. There was much fuss about the presence of Roman Polanski’s The Palace out of competition. Those who felt his conviction for unlawful sex with a minor in 1978 should prohibit his entry will have been happy to hear the film went down with a splat. Coscripted by the veteran Jerzy Skolimowski, the satirical comedy goes among the super-rich at the Gstaad Palace Hotel on Millennium Eve. The acting is a tad broad – Mickey Rourke and John Cleese lay it on thick – but the jokes are tolerable and the production is sleek. What really holds it back is the thumping obviousness of its barn-door targets. Russian gangsters. Vulgar Texan millionaires. Elderly ladies with grotesque plastic surgery. In the age of The White Lotus, The Palace seems like awfully old hat.

Equally rubbished in the opening days – and this time in the main competition – was Luc Besson’s bafflingly idiotic Dogman. Caleb Landry Jones plays an oddball, misused in childhood, who ends up taking care of a varied pack of lovable urban mutts. It feels a bit like a superhero origin story, with the protagonist training his animals to achieve any impossible feat, but there is also a sense of Saturday-afternoon Disney TV about it. Not unentertaining. Not unterrible. Funnier than The Palace, despite it not actually being a comedy.

Getting back to who wasn’t here, William Friedkin, the legendary director of The Exorcist, died between the announcement of the programme and the screening of what turned out to be his last film. Friedkin’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, made for the Showtime channel, has another crack at an old war house of a play that has endured for 70 years. Kieffer Sutherland is Captain Queeg – a character most famously played by Humphrey Bogart – chief witness in the court martial of an allegedly mutinous officer. Friedkin makes little effort to open out the production, but a storming performance from Jason Clarke as the defence council helps the yarn rattle on satisfactorily. A classy, if modest, way for a great director to bow out.

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It is inexpressibly vulgar to mention the Oscars as autumn takes its first breath – indeed, after a rainy start, Venice returned to baking temperatures at the weekend – but the festival’s recent strong performance has unquestionably profited from the perception it fires the starting gun on that season. A flotilla of US productions made it across the lagoon to engage in opening sorties.

Michael Mann’s Ferrari, a long-cherished project, is, on the surface, the sort of film that interests awards bodies. Working from a decades-old script by the late Troy Kennedy Martin, creator of Z Cars, the film finds Adam Driver’s Enzo Ferrari, former racing driver, now face of the eponymous motor company, manoeuvring difficult postwar years. This feels like a tidy miniature from the director of Heat and The Insider. The drama has just about enough fervour to engage throughout – a spectacular Penélope Cruz chews up the “wife part” and spits it out in bloodied scraps – but the project is at its best during the often-terrifying racing sequences. The camera keeps low to emulate the racer’s view. Classy. Elegant. But a bit lacking in expected vroom.

Taken from Priscilla’s own memoir, Coppola’s film is cunning in its teasing out of her late husband’s damaging insecurities

Bradley Cooper, whose directorial debut, A Star Is Born, was a sensation, goes back behind the camera with a handsome, sweeping but somewhat sketchy biopic of the US composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. The director has already received much negative publicity for playing the lead role in a fake nose, but it is his overworked vocal impersonation (honestly, how many would recognise Bernstein’s speaking voice?) that ends up grating more. Carey Mulligan fares better as Felicia Montealegre, the director’s long-suffering wife, but the script fails to fully clarify what accommodation she made with her husband’s gay affairs. Some wonderful long takes. Sweeping music (obviously). But the Netflix film feels only partially formed.

Considerably better, on related themes, was Sofia Coppola’s enchanting Priscilla. This time the wife to a troubled musician is the sometime Mrs P Presley of Memphis, Tennessee. Cailee Spaeny plays the young Priscilla in a film that treads carefully in treating her first encounter Elvis, at the age of 14. It is a hugely uncomfortable scenario, but the director’s own screenplay is adamant in stressing the singer’s almost fetishist dedication to chastity before eventually drawing her to Graceland. There is a little of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in this examination of a young woman sucked into a very different kind of court. Taken from Priscilla’s own memoir, the film is cunning in its teasing out of her late husband’s damaging insecurities. But, as often with this director, it is the luscious textures that most engage. We begin in mahogany gloom and return there as the relationship curdles. Watch Coppola’s way with Americana: perfume bottles, airline tickets, hairspray. Priscilla Presley was at the Venice press conference and broke down as she thanked Coppola from the audience. “It’s very difficult seeing a movie about your life. I think Sofia did an amazing job,” she said.

Netflix was all over this year’s festival. Maestro will emerge on the service. So will David Fincher’s The Killer, Pablo Larraín’s El Conde, both here in competition, and, playing out of competition, Wes Anderson’s short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Anderson’s film continues Netflix’s busy exploitation of the rights to Roald Dahl’s work. It is a cleverly nested work that allows Ralph Fiennes, playing the grumpy author, to talk us – via a gorgeously contained Ben Kingsley – towards Benedict Cumberbatch as a self-important gent with an unlikely gift. It is necessarily a bit of a doodle, but a pretty one. Larraín, the Chilean director of Jackie and Spencer, has grim fun satirising Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire who doesn’t fully understand the closeness of his familial relationship to his old pal Margaret Thatcher.

The Killer, however, feels like the most hotly anticipated of Netflix’s Venice premieres. Michael Fassbender, who – busy driving racing cars – has barely been on screen for the past 10 years, returns as a nihilistic hitman forced to bloodily tidy away the consequences of a botched assassination. Leaning towards Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, this taught, nippy film is at home to sly comedy. The unnamed hero plays The Smiths repeatedly. His voiceover takes on the quality of a self-help tirade. “Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Forbid empathy,” he drawls. Indeed, you could just about read The Killer as the darkest and pithiest of comedies. After the muddled Mank, it feels good to have this cool-headed, genre-friendly Fincher back. It simply feels good to have Fassbender back.

Lanthimos’s film must now be favourite to become the third Irish film — after Michael Collins and The Magdalene Sisters — to win the Golden Lion at Venice

Generating a different timbre of buzz on the first weekend was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist. The Japanese director won a seat at the top table when his 2021 film Drive My Car secured a surprising four Oscar nominations, including those for best picture and best director. The new film takes an unusual premise and, while shifting perspectives subtly, moves from a light naturalistic drama to something more strange and beautiful. Evil Does Not Exist has to do with a company seeking to establish a glamping facility near a close-knit rural community. A first meeting goes badly, but it does manage to alert the firm’s PR people to the flaws in their corporate ethos. Gorgeous, ominous music from Eiko Ishibashi hints at a coming shift in mood but doesn’t quite prepare you for the ultimate transcendent lurch. A highly engaging ecofable.

For all the fine premieres mentioned above, there was one film that unquestionably dominated the conversation in the first week of Venice 80. Yorgos Lanthimos has been working on his adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s great feminist novel Poor Things for more than two years. That is not always a good sign, but the film arrived to genuine hollers of approval on Friday evening. Produced by Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe of Dublin’s Element Pictures, Poor Things stars an otherworldly Emma Stone as the Frankensteinian creation of a not-quite-mad scientist in 19th-century London. Snatched from her home by a caddish Mark Ruffalo, this fast-developing creature – result of transplanting an unborn baby’s brain into the skull of her mother – remains stubbornly robust as she encounters all the manifestations of masculine control. It is a weird, unsettling comedy that manages to be deeply serious about all the things that really matter. Originated by Element in Dublin, the film must now be favourite to become the third Irish film – after Michael Collins and The Magdalene Sisters – to win the Golden Lion at Venice. Then again, if the jury, headed by Damien Chazelle, choose to award Emma Stone best actress, the arcane rules preclude the same film winning top prize. Might Sofia Coppola win her second Lion? We will know on Saturday.