I’ve never been to the fabled Telluride Film Festival, nor
to the festivals in beauteous locales San Sebastian and Locarno, so I’m not
really speaking from a place of thorough expertise, but let’s put it this way:
I’ve developed a sufficient crush on the Venice Film Festival to proclaim it my
favorite. Right now on the Lido it’s so beautiful outside that one understands
the phrase “endless summer.” And inside the halls the films are … well, so far
all have been of interest, at least. I can discuss two of the four I saw
today—the other two will be addressed in forthcoming pieces about the Bienalle
College, where I’m serving on a critical panel, and the festival’s revival and
restorations section—that’ll give you a tiny idea of the variety on hand.
Friday morning began with Tom Ford’s “Nocturnal Animals,” written by the director, who here adapts the
novel “Tony and Susan” by Austin Wright. The thing about film festivals is, you
never know what you’re going to see, and you particularly never know what
you’re going to see at 8:30 in the morning. (Ask me some time about seeing
Bruno Dumont’s “Twentynine Palms” in Toronto back in the day.) The opening
images of “Nocturnal Animals” are not those you’d expect to see at such an
hour, or at any hour really, so surprising and disturbing and “why, why, why”
inducing are they. I won’t spoil them here. See me after class.
Said images aren’t gratuitous; they make up a portion of a
conceptual art exhibition hosted by Amy Adam’s Susan, a high roller in the Los
Angeles art world. Susan is beautiful, haughty and lives an extravagant
lifestyle funded largely, we assume, by her husband Hutton, played with
born-into-privilege knowingness by Armie Hammer, who’s making a nice little
career niche for himself in such roles. After her opening, Susan gives herself
a nasty paper cut opening a package: the manuscript of a first novel by Edward
Sheffield, Susan’s first husband. Just as we think we’re in for two hours of
“Aren’t these people phony,” a seemingly parallel narrative pops up in which
Tony Hastings, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is taking off on a road trip through
West Texas with lovely wife (Isla Fisher) and lovely but typically disaffected
teen daughter (Ellie Bamber). On the road, late at night, Tony and his family
have a run-in with exactly the kind of people with whom you don’t want to have
a run in, under any circumstances: three amped-up wastrels led by a schizzy
dude named Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, in a role that will earn him the legit
cred he’s been going after, on and off, for a while). Things go from bad to
worse in a sequence that’s one of the tensest and discomfortingly suspenseful
in a Hollywood film since maybe “Blue Velvet.” This despite the fact that at a
certain point we know that this narrative is a fiction—the novel that Edward
has sent, and it turns out has dedicated, to Susan.
And then a third narrative thread comes into play, the story
of Susan and Edward, also played by Gyllenhaal. The stories are kept in the air
beautifully by Ford, the fashion designer who’s learned a lot about the
distinction between effective stylization and ostentatious stylization since
his debut feature of 2009, “A Single Man.” The movie’s not 100 percent
there—some of the social satire is underbaked, particularly a funny but facile
scene featuring Jena Malone as a museum official wearing a dress that looks
like a rejected costume for the chessboard scene in “Alice Through The Looking
Glass.” (Speaking of career niches, between this and “Neon Demon,” Malone seems
to be carving out one in the Horribly Affected Arty Angeleno department.) Abel
Korzenioski’s very prominent musical score is almost pure pastiche, but it’s
accomplished: its fake Bernard Herrmann is as convincing as its fake Phillip
Glass. The acting is 100 percent spectacular, with Michael Shannon winning
First Among Equals for his work as an unconventional Texas lawman. The film’s
finale still has me … flummoxed, but in an interested and engaged way.
You ever wonder what “My Dinner With Andre” would be like … in
3D? Well, if Wim Wenders’ “Les Beaux
Jours D’Aranjuez” finds American distribution, you might be able to enjoy
an approximation of the experience. The movie, which sees Wenders once again
working with novelist and playwright Peter Handke (their collaborations have
given birth to classics such as “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick” and
“Wings of Desire”), is an adaptation of a play by the writer. After a montage
of a peaceable Paris and outskirts set to the strains of Lou Reed’s “Perfect
Day,” Wenders’ camera settles on a very cherry vintage Wurlitzer jukebox playing
the tune in the home of a German speaking-writer who likes his technology
analog: he soon settles down at a portable manual typewriter and begins writing
a dialogue between a man and a woman. That man and woman materialize in the
garden outside his writing room, and they begin talking. First about sexual
experiences of men and women, and then … all sorts of other stuff, mostly
pertaining to how the sexes perceive things differently.
And that … is the movie. There’s a cameo from Nick Cave, who
turns up to complete a Nick Cave song that start out on the jukebox. Mr. Handke
himself appears as an eccentric landscaper. But the movie is the garden, the
dialogue, and the writer’s grappling with the dialogue. And I have to admit I
was at a little bit of a disadvantage, as the screening I attended had no
English subtitles. The dialogue is in French with a little bit of German, and
the subtitles were in Italian. I understand just enough of the three languages
to pick up the threads of the dialogue, but let me tell you it’s not a good
strategy to start out hearing a sentence in French and trying to keep up with
it by reading the continuation of the sentence in Italian. As for those who say
Wenders is out of his tree to make such a movie in 3D, I disagree. He’s clearly
excited enough by the format that he’s making it a regular part of his
cinematic language. At 71 years of age, he’s more future-driven than many
filmmakers one or two generations behind him.
To read the rest of Glenn Kenny’s coverage from the 2016 Venice Film Festival, click here.
