For the second year in a row at the Venice Film Festival I
had the honor of participating in the critic’s panel for the films of the
Biennale College. This is a four-year old program of the Festival. If it were
an American reality television show, it might be called “Art Film Challenge.”
Choosing from a pool of over 1,000 submissions from filmmakers, the Festival
awards up to three (in this year’s case, four) submitters a budget of 150,000
Euros. The strictures the filmmakers then face are to deliver a finished
feature film for that budget, nothing more, and to have that film ready for the
festival in a year’s time.
“Do film critics matter?” is a question that gets asked a
lot these days, sometimes in conjunction with the chestnut “Do films matter?”
Critics matter in the final stretch of the Biennale College process. The
esteemed film writer Peter Cowie invites a group of critics from the U.S. over
to look at the films and offer frank assessments of their chances in the
critical forums and actual markets of America and wherever else a given critic
may believe his or her expertise extends to. This year my fellow panelists were
Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Phillips of the Chicago
Tribune, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Vognar of the Dallas
Morning News and Stephanie Zacharek of Time.
As I said in answer to one question I was asked on the
panel, personal taste is one thing. It’s not entirely unrelated to the ability
to recognize a singular or notable artistic voice. The four films this year
were “Orecchie,” directed by
Alessandro Aronadio, an absurdist comedy from Italy; “Mukti Bhawan (Hotel Salvation),” an Indian drama directed by
Shubhashish Bhutiani; “Una Hermana,”
an Argentina-set film directed by Sofia Brockenshire and Verena Kuri, and “La Soledad,” from Venezuela, directed
by Jorge Thielen Armand. Each of these films has a distinctive voice and a
culturally specific perspective, which I think bodes well in a film culture
that is growing both increasingly fragmented (not necessarily a good thing) and
increasingly diverse (definitely a good thing).
The strongest immediate
impression initially comes from “La Soledad,” which has a documentary quality
that is not accidental; the storyline, about a poor family living in a Caracas
house that had been bequeathed, in a sense, to a one-time maid there, is acted
out by a cast of real-life personages in something like that exact situation. It
puts a human face on the economic catastrophe of contemporary Venezuela,
something the rest of us only read about, and it does so in a way that’s
affectionate, sometimes humorous, sometimes poetic and ultimately devastating.
The seemingly elemental, elliptically told narrative of “Una
Hermana” gains resonance as one turns it over; the protagonist Alba’s search
for her missing sister gains in desperation to the extent that it alters the
reality of the film itself. “Hotel Salvation” is more straightforward, a story
of father-son reconciliation (of sorts) with a setting most Westerners are
unaware of: hotels in the holy city of Varanisi where older citizens stay in
the hopes of meeting their maker and achieving salvation there.
The protagonists of these pictures are all operating under
economic disadvantages that are not inconsiderable. Had Alessandro Aronadio
made “Orecchie” in the ‘60s or ‘70s, its unnamed sad-sack hero, a philosophy
teacher, would likely be in not uncomfortable circumstances. But the 21st
century being what it is, this guy’s pretty hard up too. Waking one morning to
a weird ringing in his ears, and a note on his fridge telling him his friend
Luigi has died—only he doesn’t know any Luigi—he has a fraught and awkward
encounter with some nuns and a neighbor before trudging to the Italian version
of a walk-in budget clinic to look into the issue. Genuinely mordant hilarity
ensues—it is not quite accurate to compare this to peak “Seinfeld,” but there
is an affinity there, and not just in the soundtrack, which is heavy on
musical themes played on a bass (acoustic this time out). The film also has a
formal device that some will find interesting and others confounding.
The panel was stimulating and rewarding for the critics and
I hope it was the same for the filmmakers, who were in the audience. Last
year’s Biennale College yielded the subsequent American indie success “The
Fits.” I hope we see all of these films become accessible to you some time
soon, and we’ll keep you posted when they are.
To read the rest of Glenn Kenny’s coverage from the 2016 Venice Film Festival, click here.
