Pedro Almodovar and Nicole Garcia rekindle the flame in Venice

On the third day, the Mostra seems to have found its cruising speed.

In any case, she has learned to live with the Covid or the Covid and, if there are a few hiccups (a somewhat long wait at the checkpoint, the same seat allocated to two journalists), the festival is less sinister than a sad carnival .

Even masked, the desire for cinema is there and festival-goers do not shy away from their pleasure.

Pedro Almodovara summed up the general feeling: “

”.

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, the testimony of former Nazis in front of the camera, screened in Venice

The Spanish filmmaker has come to present a thirty-minute medium-length film,

, freely adapted from Jean Cocteau's play in which a woman on the phone tries to bring back the man she loves.

Tilda Swinton, present on the Lido to receive a Golden Lion of Honor, plays this woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in an apartment setting (that of the filmmaker, already seen in

 ?) Filmed as a decor since Almodovar shows the film studio that hosts him.

We can see in it a mise en abyme and a metaphor of confinement.

Or something a little chic and fake which above all illustrates Almodovar's furious desire to shoot.

The selectors have in any case had the strange idea of ​​placing this short film before the very frivolous

, by Jasmila Zbanic, in the running for the Golden Lion.

Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2006 with her first feature film,

, the Bosnian filmmaker recounts here the Srebrenica massacre, perpetrated on July 11, 1995 under the eyes of UN peacekeepers.

Or how more than 8,000 men and adolescents were killed by the Army of the Bosnian Serb Republic under General Mladic.

Violence remains off-screen but it creeps into every scene, every face, every look.

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Another director opened the competition and she too convinced.

This is the French Nicole Garcia, back in Venice twenty years after

.

, a nervous and sensual romantic thriller, features Stacy Martin and Pierre Niney as a young couple of our time.

She is a student in a hotel school, he is a dealer in the beautiful districts of Paris.

Not really a profession of the future.

Unlike Benoît Magimel, an insurer in Geneva who has succeeded in everything and above all masterful as a man in love.

Nicole Garcia brilliantly interweaves class struggle and movement of the heart.

Years of lead and Indian music

All is not so exciting and the Mostra also finds a semblance of normality by offering, like all major film festivals, films that arouse annoyance.

This is the case of

, by the Italian Claudio Noce, a clumsy evocation of the Years of Lead.

He imagines the attempted assassination of a judge by far-left terrorists in Rome in 1976. Pierfransco Favino, seen in

by Marco Bellocchio, attributes these traits to him.

Riddled with bullets, the magistrate survives but his son Valerio does not recover from the trauma (he has seen everything from the balcony).

Noce is inspired by his own story: his father himself was the victim of an attack he witnessed as a child.

And yet he doesn't have much to say about it except the fear that settles in the family.

He films the fair-haired Valerio from every angle, abusing slow motion and music.

The boy's friendship with Christian, a lonely teenager, leads to a suspense that is more disturbing than worrying.

We are far from the finesse and complexity of the superb

, by Marco Bellocchio, on the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades.

Finally,

, by Indian director Chaitanya Tamhane should not find any competition for the Golden Lion of the most unlikely film.

We follow to Mumbai a singer specializing in Indian classical music.

A purist who, between two masturbations in front of his computer and two lessons with his master, works to make his art known.

Both dull and nebulous (portrait of a fanatic? Treatise on musicology?),

will not make waves on the lagoon.