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VENICE 1989 – THE 46TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL GONDOLA WIND by Harlan Kennedy This year Venice went
green – the festival catalogue with matching poster, the bunting outside the
Palazzo del Cinema, the
algae-infested Adriatic. Greenpeace's new Rainbow
Warrior II boat was on hand. It's a green world and the 46th Mostra del Cinema is doing its bit for peace, the environment and
world harmony. Festival director Guglielmo Biraghi insisted when he came
to power three years ago: no jingoism, please, we're a global village. Films
now enter Venice under their maker's name, not their country's. This year the
Brotherhood-of-Man (-and-Woman) ethos has spread through the festival like
greenfly. Paul Cox's Island,
Alain Tanner's La Femme
de Rose Hill, Gabriel Axel's Christian: the
competition seethes with films in which a group of irreconcilable people get
together and, well, reconcile themselves. The upside is the
encouragement this gives filmmakers to sew ambitious sutures in the body
geographic: finding the common humanity that spans or synergizes different
cultures. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's City of Sadness (Taiwan) is a Far-Eastern
history lesson humanized as the story of a family: postwar turmoil, as
China and Japan struggle over control of the island, is mirrored and counterpointed in the lives of three Taiwanese brothers.
Tanner's La Femme de Rose Hill is a female bonding pic
set
in a Swiss Village in which an "arranged bride" from an Indian
Ocean island moves in with an old lady villager after quitting her male
chauvinist spouse. Best of all, Russian
director Otar Ioseliani's
Et La Lumiere Fut is an African tribal
comedy in which hut villagers resist
encroaching white tree-fellers. Fleeing townwards
to join civilization ("Ssss!"), they sell
their rain gods as sidewalk souvenirs – an over-obvious didactic payoff to a
delightful movie. The downside to
harmonize-the-world cinema: it fosters that monster of our times, the
co-production. How about a movie directed by Alain Resnais,
scripted by Jules Pfeiffer and starring
Adolph Green and Gerard Depardieu making
mincemeat of each other's languages? We have it in I Want To Go Home: the tale of a Cleveland
cartoonist (Green) who goes to France to be feted for his funny pages.
Laugh? You're too busy wincing at the clumsiness of Pfeiffer's Franglais
dialogue. You may prefer – but I
doubt it – a movie made by a Dutch-Australian director on a Dodecanese island
with a mixed Greek-French-Australian-Indian cast. In Paul Cox's Island, Irene Papas
is the lifeforce heroine who befriends
drug-addicted Aussie tourist Eva Sitta. Round
these two gather a crowd of polyglot weirdos
(artists, heroin-pushers, village idiots) speaking in what the Venice catalogue
called "mistilingui," – the shape of
things to come perhaps, especially in a world full of greenness, glasnost and
geo-political detente. Gabriel Axel's Christian (Denmark) even implies a
religious dimension to all this. The eponymous teenage hero flees juvenile
prison for roamings and self-discovery in France,
Spain and Morocco. Stumbling through the desert, he's taken in by a friendly
Berber tribe. This is inspirationally implausible. The smiling Berbers invoke
Allah, the smiling boy undergoes a Christ-like passion/redemption and a
smiling Berber girl promises to be his bride. Even from the director of Babettes Feast, this vision of a world
saved by hospitality – the Third World offering bread and moral uplift to the
First World – has an optimism verging on the loony. It takes Peter Greenaway to remind us that food is as often a casus belli as a means of
peace. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is the Brit filmmaker's
best yet. In a world trying to green itself back into Eden, Greenaway throws enough serpents into the scenario to
remind us that even when every prospect pleases, man is still around, vile to
the last. In a crimson-colored
restaurant thick with luxury, owned by roaring London gangster Michael Gambon, across
a landscape of boar's heads, steaming venisons and
rearing cornucopias of fruit, Gambon's wife Helen Mirren and lonely, bookish diner Alan Howard exchange
looks and rendezvous in the loo. Will Gambon – stupid, foulmouthed and deafening – suspect? If
so, will the all-seeing French chef (Richard Bohringer)
protect this modern-day Adam and Eve (who spend much of the movie in the
nude) from his wrath? If you can form cogent
questions like this while watching the film, you're cooler than I. It took me
two days to recover from its unforeseen splendors. Greenaway,
whose movies never showed much sympathy for realism, has finally assassinated
it here. The film sets up four zones of action, each with their own dominant,
all-saturating color: red for restaurant, green for kitchen, white for
bathroom, night-blue for the studio-built street outside. This last is a
stunning Fellinian caprice: steam, neon
and prowling dogs. The dogs throw vast shadows and bark approvingly whenever Gambon and his minions take a client outside and beat him
up. They also gobble up the restaurant scraps thrown out by perfectionist
chef Bohringer. In Greenaway's
fable of a reverse Eden, God's a gangster, the serpent's a French tastebud-tempter, and Adam and Eve fall from sin into a
kind of innocence. Hell laps at the garden gates, and Heaven is in the
forbidden luxuriance of the Tree of Knowledge – not just the visible
"fruit" of the feast, but also the leaves from books: Howard, to Gambons disgust, reads as he dines, and the couple's lovenest is a gilded Xanadu of
books. The movie's miracle is
that it's never just an egghead director's parlor game. It's two hours of
cinematic brainstorming. Epic tracking-shots drag us from one color-coded
thematic zone to another, powered by the mantric
rhythms of Michael Nyman's music. Hyperbole is unapologetic: the lovers flee
in a truckful of worm-seething meat carcasses. And
expressionist conjuring tricks are taken in joyous stride: Mirren's clothes change color chameleon-like from zone to
zone; a cook-choirboy's icy-beautiful soprano bursts forth in inexplicable
waves in the kitchen. Witty, sensual and
intelligent, this movie is one of the masterpieces of the Eighties. Why it wasn't in
competition is a mystery. Apparently, Sgr. Biraghi decided to limit himself to one British entry (I
thought we weren't bothering about flags or nation quotas), and preferred
Peter Hall's She's Been Away. God knows why. This
dim little caper written by Stephen Poliakoff (Hidden City) depicts
the budding buddiness between wacky frustrated
socialite Geraldine James and her in-law
relative, ex-mental patient Peggy Ashcroft. Far from finding her a nuisance, Geraldine finds
her a kindred spirit. Soon they are charging across England getting drunk,
vandalizing hotels and having a whale of a time. The audience has a
minnow of a time, never believing a frame, thanks to Ms. James' overacting
and Hall's direction-by-cliché, (e.g., the "rich can't communicate"
scene of husband and wife sitting at opposite ends of a long dining table.)
There's also a déjà vu factor – She's Been Away is Rain Man in drag. Without
Dustin Hoffman. (Needless to say,
Ashcroft and James shared the Best Actress prize: there's no reasoning with
some juries.) America herself,
though she may not have offered movies about the mad, did offer mad movies.
Wendell B. Harris' Chameleon Street, a collection of narrative loose ends masquerading as
a comedy, shows what happens if you try to make a Spike Lee film without
being Spike Lee. (Sometimes it doesn't even work if you are Spike Lee.) And Oja Kodar's Jaded shows
what happens if you're a beautiful Yugoslavian who spent the prime of her
life as helpmeet to Orson Welles. You develop
delusions of genius. For your first feature you create a crazy-quilt of sex,
violence and Z-movie dialogue set in Venice, California. And you shove in
five seconds of Welles's The Merchant of Venice
to show you have access to the Master's estate, if not to his talent. Henry Jaglom's New Years Day, America's competition entry, was much better. This
was known in Venice as The Kook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover and Any
Other Friend of Jaglom's Who Turned Up On Set to
Grab a Part. At least there's a
cogent mind ticking away inside the kookiness. Jaglom
lies back and thinks of Freud as the human contents of his sublet New York
apartment spill their grief, lust, wit and hysteria. Jaglom
hardly needs to change subjects from film to film. The mixture's always fun
and here's one old chum of O. Welles who does his
own talented, un-Wellesian thing. (No clips from The
Merchant of Venice.) The festival jury,
starring the likes of Polish helmer Krzysztof Kiéslowski, Italian eyeful Mariangela
Melato and
American Werewolf John Landis, wrestled with many
hours of celluloid, some of which should never have been exposed in the labs,
let alone to an audience: Amos Gitai's Berlin-Jerusalem, a stilted
conscience-basher about Jewish persecution and early Zionism (ripe subject,
rotten treatment); Jean Jacques Andrien's slumbrous Australia, in which
French-accented wool trader Jeremy Irons is torn between a good woman in
Belgium (Fanny Ardant) and his sheep down under;
George Panassopoulos's M'Agapas
(Do You Love Me?) (Greece),
a string of soft-porn interludes masquerading as a dying hedonist's memories;
and Kei Kumai's Sen
No Rikyu,
detailing the mystical rites of the Japanese tea ceremony. This last stars
Toshiro Mifune as the aging tea-master Rikyu, who commits hara-kiri just before the audience
starts considering the idea. The film is two hours long, deeply obscure and
almost wholly static. Set to music and re-titled Everybody Comes to Rikyu, it
might have a chance. The only competition pic to win hurrahs from nearly everyone was Ettore Scola's Che Ora
E?
(What Time Is It?). Scola is
Italian cinema's Mr. Softee. Whenever you hear the
ice-cream jingle come over the hill, you know it's another rueful, rollicking
comedy from the director of Macaroni and Splendor. This one
has Marcello Mastroianni and Massimo Troisi (both wonderful and
joint winners of the Best Actor prize) as a semi-estranged father and sailor
son sparring through a long day of knockabout, tears and classic paternal faux
pas. All ends sweetly. There's a heraldic aptness about a two-handed
Italian movie shot on a tiny budget in overcast weather in a one-horse
location. The festival itself is facing lean times: budget gnawed at by
inflation, its annual consignment of Hollywood celebs
thinning and the later-and-later start date, dictated by Venice hoteliers
wanting to stretch the summer season, means we're shivering in our Guccis by final week. Will we be back next
year? You betcha.. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN THE NOV-DEC 1989 ISSUE OF FILM
COMMENT. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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