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Rich cattle breeders: Jane Campion's "The Power of the Dog"
Photo: BBC Films / imago images / ZUMA Press
The opening evening largely belongs to the older men. Alberto Barbera, the 71-year-old head of the Venice Film Festival, had already apologized in advance this year for not really promoting the strengthening of women's power in the cinema with his current program. Instead of eight female directors as in the previous year, this year Alberto Barbera is only presenting five female directors in the competition, which brings together a total of 21 films.
And for the opening gala on Wednesday, he left the stage in the Festival Palace and the screen to two warriors of European cinema. The 68-year-old Italian comedian Roberto Benigni was awarded the Lion of Honor, drew his famous pinocchio grimace and cracked jokes about politics and football. And the 71-year-old Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar showed a comedy as the opening film that deals with many highly topical social issues of origin, gender relations and morals in a ludicrous and very clever way.
"Parallel Mothers," as Almodóvar's opening film is called, is a triumph of two really gorgeous actresses.
The Spanish star Penélope Cruz and the still very young Milena Smit play two pregnant women who meet in the hospital shortly before their daughters are born and who soon become entangled in a tragic and comical story.
As is to be expected with this director, it deals with absolutely natural fluid sexual preferences and unusual maternal role models - and also with the rather classic suspicion of parents that their own offspring may have been exchanged for a strange brood shortly after their birth in the hospital.
Cotton swabs for the determination of scientific genetic analyzes
Is that suitable as material for the opening film of an important film festival? Necessarily. You can see the heroines of "Parallel Mothers" fiddling with cotton swabs for the determination of scientific genetic analyzes, waking up to the baby bed in brightly colored city apartments, quarreling with the mostly absent fathers of their babies and mourning terrible losses. And when the plot moves to the country in between, a history-political lesson lurks in the middle of the melodrama. Janis, played by Penélope Cruz, urges that her great-grandfather and his companions, who were murdered by the right wing in the Spanish Civil War and buried in a mass grave, be exhumed. One cannot shut up the past, any injustice will one day come to light, according to a text overlay at the end of Almodóvar's film.
Traditionally, the Venice Film Festival, unlike the one in Berlin, is not necessarily known for the fact that politics and the world's crises play a major role here. But due to Corona and the terrorist threat that may have increased after the change of power in Afghanistan, this year it looks a bit as if the festival has holed up behind barricades. The red carpet, on which the curious crowd otherwise, is sealed off by a high wall in front of the festival palace. A huge number of police officers, security locks and concrete drive-through barriers protect the site from unwanted intruders. A complicated electronic ticket system ensuresthat only some of the seats in the cinema halls are allowed to be occupied and that many of the accredited festival guests are constantly hacking around on computers and telephones in order to find a seat somewhere in the cinema. As if to comfort the guests, the jury chairman of this festival year, the Korean Oscar winner Bong Joon-Ho, announced in Venice that the cinema would not allow itself to be overcome by Corona and all other injustices in the world.
The cinema of the New Zealander Jane Campion can hardly be shaken by a crisis in her preferences and artistic idiosyncrasies. The director, who had a worldwide success in 1993 with the actress Holly Hunter and the film "Das Piano", shot another film almost three decades later with the support of the streaming company Netflix that tells of a widow and a piano, which turns it into a pretty A world far removed from culture blows away. In "The Power of the Dog" Kirsten Dunst plays this widow, who this time gets into a dispute between two brothers in rural North America in 1925.
The guys are wealthy cattle breeders, live with their helpers on a remote giant ranch and have shared their bedroom for forty years - until one of the two gets married. The director shows the struggle of two men, who are obviously at least half conscious of their own homosexuality, with an outside world shaped by macho comboy ideals with great restedness. The actors Jesse Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch engage in an archaic fight of angry looks and suppressed aggression, in which Cumberbatch makes his bright eyes flicker in an emphatically demonic manner and rolls around naked in the mud of a mountain stream.
"The Power of the Dog" is a film adaptation of a novel published by the US writer Thomas Savage (1915 to 2003) in the 1960s and is almost inevitably reminiscent of Ang Lee's hit film "Brokeback Mountain" from 2005. He adds little new to it . There are many spectacularly barren landscapes to admire, strange male rituals on the cattle pasture and, of course, a great Kirsten Dunst as the cattle breeder's wife, increasingly deranged from alcohol and worrying about her half-orphaned son. But with all due respect for the almost meditative view of the milieu of the director Campion, it is not always easy to understand why she absolutely had to make this splendidly furnished historical film. In the year 2021, there is no more pressing drama to tell than that of a few men who unfortunately have not learnedto show their feelings and act out their sexual desires?