“The plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat’s side; and when at last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being.”
That is Ruskin, describing the ideal approach to Venice, in 1850. Fast-forward a century and a half, and somehow, despite everything, the marvelling remains. Only a few minor details have changed. This week, for instance, the view from a vaporetto, chugging by a hundred yards offshore, was as follows: reading from right to left, one observed the Ducal Palace, still blushing after all these years; the entrance to St Mark’s Square, flanked by its twin pillars, one lion-topped; the campanile, as proud as a rocket on its pad; a flank of the Zecca, once the home of the local mint; and, stretched across it, grander and greedier for worship than any altarpiece of the city, James Franco. His image, bedecked with shades and the perfect length of mini-beard, adorns an advertisement for Gucci, and first-time visitors to Venice could be forgiven for asking what venerable place he holds in the history of the Republic. Was this dude a doge, or something?
As far as the past fortnight is concerned, the answer is yes. Franco has directed a movie, “Child of God,” which showed at the Venice Film Festival in competition—that is to say, duking it out with nineteen other films for the honor of the Golden Lion. In a remarkable show of restraint, Franco does not star in his own film, though he does appear as a school soccer coach, preying on the girls in his squad, in “Palo Alto,” also screening at Venice, which was directed by Gia Coppola—how, you might ask, did she get a foot in the door?—and adapted from a book of short stories by James Franco. Basically, the guy is everywhere. I was in a hotel bar, last weekend, when, from the far end of the room, came the rumble and buzz that signal the passing of a star. And lo, there was Franco, making solemn progress amid a host of minders, hangers-on, photographers, and other orbital persons. I once saw Mahmoud Abbas traverse a lobby in Paris with half the entourage and a fraction of the fuss. Apotheosis came when Franco appeared, formally clad, at the premiere for “Child of God,” complete with mirrored shades, which allowed a few, blessed members of the public to see themselves reflected in his glory. To be fair, however, rumors that his first name could be changed from “James” to “Generalissimo” were swiftly scotched.
And what of his work? Well, “Child of God” was adapted from Cormac McCarthy; Scott Haze plays Lester Ballard, a lonely woodsman, unsound of mind but good with a gun, who is discarded by polite society. He finds the corpse of a young woman in a car, takes it back to his shack, and dresses it up in a nice red frock; from there, events follow their unnatural course. If asked, Lester would deride Norman Bates as a mere taxidermist, with no real taste for adventure. Like a number of other films at Venice, “Child of God” seems duty-bound to rub our noses in it—”it” meaning many things, some of them to do with bodily functions or malfunctions, and all of them about as far from Ducal Palaces, Gucci shades, and the plash of gentle waves as you could hope to get. Nowhere is more adept than Venice at establishing a mood, or—if only for a couple of hours—at breaking it. Does that speak of mischief, or might there be a fleck of guilt involved—the conscience of a place that has hogged more than its fair share of radiance for over a thousand years, and that feels the need to purge itself, now and then, with fragments of the seedy and the soiled?
It could be simpler than that. After all, we are talking about a film festival. There are people who go to movies, and there are people who go to film festivals, and the difference between them, by and large, is that only the latter are willing to line up for necrophilia at nine o’clock in the morning. Not just willing, but bright with larkish zeal, getting there half an hour ahead of schedule so as to grab the best seat. Necrophilia being one of those things, obviously, that you don’t want to spoil by watching from the wrong angle.
Here is the deal, according to Venice rules. Most films receive multiple screenings, maybe four or five, in the course of the festival, and the earliest of these, deliberately scheduled to wreck any civilized breakfast, are for the press, and also for “industry,” meaning not panel-beaters and welders but those who slave in the mines of the movie business. Depending on your calling, you find yourself herded into one particular file, shuffling between metal guide-rails towards your destination. To me, this always bears the faint but discernible flavor of a working abattoir, and I would not be surprised to find a hit-squad of movie directors at the other end, wearing bloody aprons and brandishing stun-guns for use on defenseless critics. Nothing less than we deserve, of course.
In some cases, the air of threat survives in the auditorium. Half a dozen arenas are pressed into service for the Festival, and I lost a big chunk of daylight, last week, in the Sala Darsena: a chilly, cavernous barn with a concrete floor, seating more than twelve hundred souls. It could, one imagines, be transformed without ado into temporary housing for the victims of a major disaster, so settling down to a James Franco movie felt like a relative relief, though not by much. This was also the venue for “Joe,” the strongest feature to date from David Gordon Green, with a forthright performance from a grizzled Nicolas Cage, and for “Night Moves,” the new Kelly Reichardt film; the first delved into the rawest of Southern lives, the second into the rarefied concerns of environmental activists, but what linked them was the compulsion, as climax neared, to spend themselves in violence—laughably so, in the latter case. Has that really become the template for all narrative conclusions, not just in the mainstream but in the more traditionally placid confines of the arthouse? Or did it only seem that way because we were watching these displays of American anger and frustration in the Serenissima, of all unlikely places? Venice floats at the other end of the spectrum, devoting itself, even now, to easy living—to the belief that the senses should be gratified, not chafed. Mind you, the privilege does not come cheap.
That may be why audiences, whether in public or press screenings, reacted with such warmth to “Philomena,” the new Stephen Frears film. This tells of an elderly Irish woman (Judi Dench), who, with the aid of a journalist, (played by Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote the script), tries to trace the son whom she was forced to give up for adoption fifty years ago. Elsewhere, perhaps, its steadiness might be construed as staidness, and the confidence of its moral pursuit as a trifle smug; yet, surrounded as it was by many films that veered towards self-importance, or whose visual allure was badly scarred by poor writing, Frears’s work felt all the more welcome in its restraint. We prepared ourselves for an emotional explosion—not for physical violence, but for that of a bursting heart—and yet, when the time came, that is not what happened. Frears put the pin back in the grenade, as it were; when was the last time you experienced that in a cinema?
“Philomena” sure left “Kill Your Darlings” in the shade. This purports to tell the tale of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other youthful talents, as they find themselves ensnared first in foolish student japes and then in darker deeds. One previous actor who played Ginsberg onscreen was, it goes without saying, James Franco, in “Howl.” How you view the new film will depend largely on whether you believe that a restless Jewish poet from New Jersey, plunging into his first sexual spates, both gay and straight, at Columbia in the nineteen-forties should or should not be played by Daniel Radcliffe. It is wholly to his credit that he should solemnly seek to extend his range like this, beyond the schoolboy exploits that made him famous; and it is absolutely not his fault that most people, watching the result, will have to clench their fists and stop themselves from crying out, “Oh my God! Harry Potter and the Blowjob of Azkaban!”
Only on a couple of occasions, in the days that I spent in Venice, did something witnessed in the dark, inside an auditorium, begin to rival the raptures that are so freely, almost annoyingly, doled out by Venice herself. And that is as it should be. There is something inherently comic about staging a movie festival in such a place; on what possible ground should you wish to see motion pictures when, not far away, there are pictures of the motionless variety, and of a refulgence that has not dimmed for more than five hundred years? One answer, perhaps, is that the festival—now in its seventieth year—is required precisely as a rebuke to those of us who are tempted, whenever we come here, to lock ourselves into the past and throw away the key. I am not as stricken in this regard as Ruskin, but then nobody is. He thought that the party was pretty much over by 1480, and that “the Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust.” But I am still a chronic case. Given the choice, I would cheerfully spend my days—the rest of them, in fact—ambling down the Riva degli Schiavoni, towards where Henry James toiled on “The Portrait of a Lady” in the Pensione Wildner, (“the view from my window was ‘una bellezza’,” he wrote); hanging a left, walking for one minute, entering the church of San Zaccaria, and parking myself in front of the Virgin with Saints Peter, Jerome, Catherine, and Lucy, painted by Giovanni Bellini in 1505. I happen to find it the most beautiful painting in the world, which makes it all the more essential to tear myself away, retrace my steps to the waterfront, step onto a vaporetto, and go to see a George Clooney film—to drag myself back to the present, if not, in this case, down to earth.
“Gravity” was the opening night movie of this year’s Venice Film Festival, and also, as one producer said to me, “the best opening night movie of the past ten years.” That was because it satisfied all parties. In dramatic terms, it was a cloistered chamber-piece, demanding no more characters than a Beckett play, and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who made “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and “Children of Men”; and yet it was also a generous offering of sci-fi—set in space, shot in 3-D, and liberally dusted with cataclysm and suspense. It was screened, that night, not in the lowly cattle-shed of the Sala Darsena but in the lusher surroundings of the Palazzo del Cinema, and Clooney and his co-star, Sandra Bullock, borne thither in Maseratis, did what the high priests of movies are meant to do—smile, wave, strike a sacred pose, and then descend to greet their congregations. If you are a guest at such events, you are always asked, “Did you get to meet the stars?” Well, yes, but only in the sense that a birdwatcher, crouched in a richly camouflaged hide with a full bladder and a packet of sandwiches, gets to “meet” the spotted woodpecker a hundred yards away. In the case of “Gravity,” we got to sit in the movie theatre, long before the movie began, and gawp at the big screen, on which was projected real-time footage of Clooney and Bullock, outside, having photos of their own faces snapped by the iPhones of hyperventilating fans. Any postmodernists present will have wet themselves for joy.
The only problem with the Venice Film Festival, a relaxed, smoothly-run, and wide-ranging affair, which takes place on the Lido, in late August, is that it takes place on the Lido, in late August. No traveller in his or her right mind goes anywhere near Venice between the butt-end of May and mid-September, unless you want to see a pitched battle between tourists and mosquitoes to see how many of them can be crammed into a square inch, but then Venice has a wicked habit of nudging you out of your right mind into the wrong. As for the Lido, give me strength. Why Robert Browning came here on a regular basis I have no idea. A long, unlovely eel of land, twenty-minutes’s boat-ride from San Zaccaria, it is a terra desolata, full of things called roads and cars and buses, barely familiar to a Venetian, and strewn with blocky modern buildings, no good restaurants, and no Bellinis. The reason that Thomas Mann called his 1912 novella “Death in Venice” rather than, say, “Lunch in Venice,” or “A nice cup of tea in Venice,” is because it was set on the Lido. Nonetheless, it has long been fashionable, although the hotel to which Mann dispatched his high-minded hero has now been shut for redevelopment. And nowhere in Venice itself could provide premises large enough for a film festival, and so it is to the Lido that festival fans must make their pilgrimage.
To me, this time, it meant a commute. Last year I took a hotel room on the Western strip of the Lido, which meant opening the curtains every day and seeing Venice proper in the distance, shimmering out of reach. By day three, I began to sympathize with the throng of the dead, beached on the bank of the underworld river, in Book VI of the Aeneid, who “stretch their hands out in longing for the farther shore.” Unwilling to revisit my lament, I stayed this year in town, in the peace of the Dorsuduro, beneath the lower curve of the Grand Canal, and was ferried across, as if by Charon, to my morning film. An unusual routine, but it made as much practical sense as taking the subway from, say, W. 96th St to Canal St to attend the Tribeca Film Festival, although even I was struck by the oddness of the arrangement as I made my way to the première of “Gravity”—cruising across a lagoon, in a tuxedo, just to see a movie. In case this sounds faintly glamorous, I should add that I felt like, and undoubtedly resembled, a nervous croupier on the way to a job interview. At least the film was fun.
“Gravity” was one of the peaks of the Festival. Some people liked Alex Gibney’s “The Armstrong Lie,” which told us more than we will ever need, or want, to know about Lance Armstrong and his cheatin’ heart; I preferred the revelations of a smaller documentary, “Bertolucci on Bertolucci,” directed by Luca Guadagnino and Walter Fasano. Bertolucci, now in a wheelchair, was the president of the jury at this year’s Festival, and so it was all the more stirring to watch him—and his younger, fervent selves—talk about the wellsprings of his art. With Armstrong, the unburdening of truth, at last, seems to have led this clenched soul no closer towards self-knowledge, whereas the inquiring candor of Bertolucci was such that it left you drained, and gasping for a grappa, as if you had just spent two hours perched at the elbow of a shrink.
Then, there was “Under the Skin,” about which I will say little for now; partly because the film should be discussed at length when it comes out in the United States (no date has yet been set) but also because I remain, like many of its characters, drifting in the dark. The fact that Jonathan Glazer’s movie was met with both boos and applause merely illustrates its capacity to confound. All you need to know, for the moment—and I was lucky enough to enter the auditorium knowing zilch, having avoided all accounts of the film in the buildup—is that it stars Scarlett Johansson, and that much of it unwinds in Glasgow and its environs. If you can understand the chewy local burr, as I can, you may have an advantage, though not a sizeable one, because dialogue, here, is not the governing force; it is your eyes that are held hostage, as the screen slowly releases its astonishments, drop by drop. Some viewers were reminded of “The Man who Fell to Earth,” and I agree, although, with so much death and desire in the offing, I also felt, by the end, as if I had sat through an unauthorized sequel to “Orphée.”
Last night, the Venice Film Festival ended, like a school term, with the prize-giving. The Golden Lion went to a documentary, “Sacro GRA,” directed by Gianfranco Rosi, about the road that girdles Rome; to my regret, it had screened late in the festival, after I had had to leave town. Let us pray that an American distributor, honoring the choice of Bertolucci and his jury, picks the movie up. Mind you, awards seldom seem to encompass a festival, let alone resolve it, as they are designed to do; the actual sensation of being there always escapes the formalities. No prize, however well-deserved, can recapture the unceasing churn of films, from day to day, and the expectant chatter of festival-goers, never quite sated, who riffle through screenings like little boys, in decades past, collecting baseball cards: “I’m seeing ‘Joe’ at nine, then the Schrader at eleven, though I may see the Australian movie instead and keep the Schrader back until late tonight, although that would clash with the Moodysson, and then there’s the German one about the policeman at four—have you seen that yet?—and I’ll definitely catch you at the Reichardt later, yeah, screw dinner. …” Is it possible to watch a movie without actually seeing it, let alone granting oneself the time, or the restful space in one’s head, to think about what it might mean?
It is also in the gift of juries to get things wrong. In 1953, the Venice jury issued no Golden Lion, having decided that, in all honesty, nothing stood out in that year’s selection. I mean, it only contained Fellini’s “I Vitelloni,” Sam Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street,” and, unbelievably, Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu Monogatari.” The following year, contenders included Mizoguchi again, with “Sansho the Bailiff,” and Fellini again, with “La Strada,” plus Visconti’s “Senso” and “On the Waterfront.” And none of them won, either; instead, the victor was “Romeo and Juliet,” directed by Renato Castellani. Sometimes the Golden Lion has no claws.
In 2013, to our delight, we saw some of those earlier events. Before every major film, the organizers, in an inspired initiative, screened short clips of newsreels from previous Festivals. No James Franco, but, by way of compensation, Orson Welles, marching into town with the most appropriate of Venetian films, his 1952 version of “Othello.” Or, the year before that, Vivien Leigh accepting a prize for Best Actress, in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” And so on, from day to day; for a fortnight, the projected cavalcade of dignitaries and half-remembered beauties unfolded before us, like one of Carpaccio’s processions across Saint Mark’s Square. Once again, the old trick was at work. The Venice of today was dwindling and vanishing into a multitude of far-gone yesterdays, twice as splendid, with an undiminished power to bewitch: “As soon as the sun set, this part of the sea teemed with gondolas adorned with beautiful women and resounded with the varied harmony of voice and musical instruments which accompanied our delightful supper until midnight.”
That is not September 2013, on the Lido, in the company of Scarlett Johansson, but the night of August 1, 1543, and a dinner party given by Titian, at his house near the Fondamenta Nuove, on Venice’s northern side. A new harpsichord had been installed. Guests included Pietro Aretino—pamphleteer, playwright, pornographer, poet, and a good man to have on your side—and Jacopo Sansovino, the architect without whom St Mark’s Square, as we know it, would scarcely exist. Four hundred and seventy summers later, how can we compare? All we can do, I guess, is to steep ourselves afresh in Titian’s legacy, starting with a foray to the Frari, to pay homage before his “Assumption,” of 1518, and to lose ourselves anew, whenever we can, in film, or snatches of film—Clooney and Bullock, for instance, wheeling and waltzing on a spacewalk, in a transport of bliss that even Titian would have struggled to imagine. Or, better yet, to pay attention to a newsreel, crisply shot, and unearthed for our consideration last week. The occasion is yet another Venice Film Festival, with actors and directors garlanded at the close. The sunlight gleams. A water-taxi moves along the Grand Canal. And look! Ecco! Which global celebrity can it be on board, hailing the crowds as he glides by, relishing his eminent spot at the very heart of the Festival? Ah yes, Joseph Goebbels, in 1942. Not all history asks to be revisited. When a place becomes a dream too far, you need to wake up fast.
Photograph by Anthony Lane.
