Before every visit to the cinema, a fever is measured in Venice.
In this year marked by the pandemic, the organizers of the film festival there show strict, almost parental care: At all entrances to the festival area and to the cinemas, security guards hold temperature measuring devices to the foreheads of the film-loving guests, and sometimes the vaccination certificates of the visitors Visitors controlled.
Festival director Alberto Barbera and his helpers proudly announce that no cases of corona infection have been detected at the 78th festival on the Lido. Which probably has to do with the fact that only every second seat is occupied in the cinemas and that all viewers wear their mouth and nose masks from the beginning to the end of the performances.
Even with the star appearances in the spotlight, attention is paid to distance and control.
When the US actress Jamie Lee Curtis, beaming, at times sniffing tears of emotion, appears on the red carpet to receive the honorary lion for her complete work, then the onlookers are largely excluded this year by a privacy screen.
She likes to act in horror films because she is so afraid that she doesn't have to act fear, says Curtis, who is presenting the horror work "Halloween Kills" by director David Gordon Green in Venice.
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The German actor Franz Rogowski, who appears in the Italian horror movie "Freaks Out", charms the media with the admission that he may have learned Italian a long time ago - but that is half forgotten, so he prefers to speak in English Answer questions in the press conference.
In "Freaks Out", Rogowski plays a squirming Nazi with six fingers on each hand, who was revered as a miracle pianist in Rome during World War II, but who secretly tortures people to death in the basement of a circus building with a devilish grin.
Unlike the routine shocker »Halloween Kills«, the film by Italian director Gabriele Mainetti made it into the competition at the Lido.
Like Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, »Freaks Out« would like to tell a ludicrous story of Nazi madness and resistance to it, but it is an extremely tasteless piece of trash cinema.
Longing for family connection
A young woman and three men who demonstrate their magical abilities in a traveling circus gradually turn out to be superheroes and superheroes in the anti-fascist resistance.
You see pathetic clown appearances and the deportation of Jewish prisoners, endless shooting and bombing scenes - and Rogowski as a crazy mega villain.
In the midst of the roar of the film, the assembled superhero staff reassures each other several times: Their struggle creates a family bond that, unfortunately, has not been granted to them in their isolated freak lives up to now.
A noticeable number of films in Venice this year tell of the longing for family ties, of the sometimes magical, sometimes diabolical power of attachment to real or imagined siblings and parents.
After Pedro Almodóvar's virtuoso opening film "Madres Paralelas" ("Parallel Mothers"), which deals among other things with the mistake of two babies in hospital, the Italian Paolo Sorrentino reports in "È stata la mano di Dio" ("The hand of God") from Death of his parents, the footballer Maradona and his young years in Naples.
After the historical family drama about Princess Diana, which the Chilean Pablo Larraín unfolds in »Spencer«, the Mexican Michel Franco describes in »Sundown« the laconic guilt-and-atonement story between two rich siblings, those of Charlotte Gainsbourg and in Acapulco Tim Roth are portrayed.
Father's charred identity card
Who the jury, chaired by Korean Bong Joon-ho and with the participation of Belgian-French actress Virginie Efira, will ultimately award the main prize of the festival - the Golden Lions - can of course not be predicted this year either.
The two outstanding films of the program so far are two horror dramas told very closely and with psychological precision along the main characters, in which the family theme is again reflected.
In “La caja” (“The Box”) the Mexican director Lorenzo Vigas sends a boy (Hatzín Navarrete) growing up with his grandmother in Mexico City by bus to the area around the city of Chihuahua on the border with the USA. The young hero is supposed to pick up the remains of his allegedly fatally injured, but perhaps also murdered, father, stowed in a metal box. To do this, he is given the dead person's charred identity card.
Instead of traveling back the day after that, the boy joins a beefy business man (Hernán Mendoza) who supposedly resembles his father but denies he is.
After some palaver, the boy is allowed to accompany the stranger in his work: He recruits thousands of unskilled workers for the huge factories in northern Mexico where cheap workers manufacture industrial goods.
At the same time, the old man is involved in murderous machinations.
In cool images that evoke the barren landscape, director Vigas tells of a broken society in which everyone seeks their own advantage, but also of a strange, almost surreal approach.
Towards the end of the film, the strange surrogate father thinks he actually recognizes the boy as his son.
The lack of solidarity among women
The look that the French director Audrey Diwan casts on the male society of the 1960s in France is even more sober, grim and ruthless. Her film »L'Événement« is a film adaptation of a book by the author Annie Ernaux, who was born in 1940 and has also been celebrated in Germany for several years. The book will be published in German translation these days under the title "The Event". It tells of a young literature student who got into trouble in France in the sixties because she became pregnant and did not want to have her child. In 1963, however, abortion was a criminal offense in France - as in many other countries - and women were unable to find help for a long time.
The art of the author Ernaux is the relentless blending of autobiographical experiences and sociological diagnosis.
The director Diwan manages in an oppressive way to translate Ernaux's working method into film images.
In sometimes shaky settings, she takes the perspective of the student Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) very directly, who studies with the money of her proletarian parents who work in a provincial pub.
Diwan shows Anne in the lecture hall, dancing in a student bar and in the confines of her dormitory.
It shows the meanness of doctors.
But also the lack of solidarity and false morals of many young women.
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The social conditions and the mechanisms of gender discrimination that this film portrays are so outrageous in many moments that the viewer feels angry.
Once the heroine seeks in vain protection in the embrace of her mother and roughly turns away.
In fact, after surviving the ordeal, she seems to have found a new family: at the end of "L'Événement" it looks as if the university and the world of the spirit could be a better, freer home for Anne.
