It's hot at the Lido, wet and hot. This is not unusual in late summer, but the heat is especially intense this year. At some point, the pressure will probably discharge with a thunderstorm, the downpour will temporarily flood some streets of the Italian lagoon city - as if "acqua alta", flood.
The thunderstorm is always in the air at the Venice Film Festival, and this year the tension seems to be higher than ever. Not only in terms of the weather. But also when it comes to the program of the 76th Mostra Internazionale on the Lido. Can Venice continue its run as an Oscar launch pad this year? Will there be protests against Roman Polanski's new film? Will Joaquin Phoenix be able to redefine the image of the Batman opponent "Joker" curled by Heath Ledger into the icon? Will take revenge that festival boss Alberto Barbera invited only two films of women in the competition?
Stunning and impressive
On Wednesday morning, however, there was not much of a controversial rush - well, it's just too hot at eight in the morning. The leisurely and pleasantly staged opening film fit quite well there, to let the critics' audience glide gently into the festival. "La vérité" is the first foreign-language film by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, shot in French and English in 2018 in Paris.
Not only because of the curiosity of "La vérité" (The Truth), but also because Kore-eda has been part of the A-League of arthouse filmmakers ever since he won the Golden Palm at Cannes last year with his family drama "Shoplifters" , Can he transfer his cinema to an international, Western-influenced context? Would he be able to elicit new facets from his high-profile leading actresses Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche?
Yes and no. It is astonishing and impressive how Kore-eda appropriates the rhythmic and mannerisms of the French author's film, but it might be a shame that not much of his handwriting remains recognizable. Apart from, of course, the deep, sensitive intrusion into complicated family constellations, the "Shoplifters" made an event, but also his early films like "Still Walking" or "Like Father, Like Son" coined.
It tells the story of a movie legend (Deneuve) who has just written her memoirs, but in it, vain as she is, has left out or honored many truths. After all, it was her story that she could tell her what she wanted. At the beginning of the film, she feeds a journalist who - admittedly - poses stupid questions with blase answer puffs.
However, when her estranged daughter Lumir (Binoche), a prolific scriptwriter, comes to visit with her young daughter and her American husband (Ethan Hawke), she is confronted with the tragedies hidden behind glory and grandezza: the loss of her own mother, the jealousy of the more talented, mortally injured sister - and her decision to sacrifice everything for acting, including her time with Lumir.
For the eternally dignified-brittle Catherine Deneuve, this role is a parade in which canvas character and real person merge. It is sometimes like watching genuine Deneuve mirroring her art and life dramas. The deceased sister, who is still present in this dysfunctional film family, reminds one of Deneuve's real older sister Francoise Dorléac, who died in a car accident in 1967.
Moritz Schultheiß / SWR
Nina Hoss and Katerina Lipovskain "Pelican Blood": Intense mother-daughter drama
Alberto Barbera had defended himself before the start of the festival against the charge of having invited too few women into the competition. He argued that there were many stories about women's fates that need to be no less impressive and strong just because they were shot by men. That's right, of course. But one does not look without a smile on how Hirokazu Kore-eda from the two great French movie stars Deneuve and Binoche can hijack his film.
A homewestern becomes a horror movie
He even seems to have noticed that himself: The young director of the futuristic family drama that Deneuve in the film is currently shooting with a younger leading actress and rival, whispers once desperately to his assistant: "They improvise all the time". The sober answer: "As long as it's good, let it go". So then somehow the women take over the direction of this somewhat too dignified opening movie.
The festival side series Orrizonti was then actually opened by a director: The German Katrin Gebbe showed her second feature film "Pelikanblut". As in her debut "Tore dances" (2013), this is also about a figure with a pronounced world improvement or martyrdom complex. The single Wiebke (Nina Hoss), who runs a horse ranch for the training of police horses, is already adopting her second Eastern European orphan. With the already somewhat older Nikolina everything went well, the girl is good at school and has a sunny mind. However, Raya, who brings Wiebke to her small western farm, smiles sweetly, but turns out to be a heavily traumatized, no empathy-capable terror dwarf.
Children can not be trained like horses, learns the self-employed cowboy woman, yet she goes to her mental and physical limits to make Raya still a loving daughter - and is thus a mother figure, the stark opposite of Catherine Deneuve's egomaniac actress. Manic features, however, have both. As in "La vérité," the men (here: the enamored cop Benedikt (Murathan Muslu)) are feminine connotated characters: they cook, provide emotional support, or guard the kids as the women drive the plot forward.
With a great sense of atmosphere and suspense Gebbe lets her adoptive drama from the first a little wooden Heimatwestern in a horror movie tilt - up to chopped off, then skewered horse heads and an exorcism. Nina Hoss is, again, brilliant, and the Katerina Lipovska impresses as a demonic Linda Blair heiress. Why the hell did not this multi-layered and exciting movie make it into the competition?