Venice makes it easy for audiences to arrive at the festival. The atmosphere is warmer and more democratic than in Cannes or Berlin. Venice is a public festival with affordable admission prices, and discounted accreditations are available for students and pensioners. On the Lido, you can sit in an improvised café under the trees, drinking cappuccino and spritz.
Alberto Barbera has been the discreet and elegant director of the Mostra D'Arte Cinematográfica since 2011 (and previously from 1998-2002) and has once again put together a top-class selection of films this year. After hardly any Hollywood stars came to Venice last year due to the actors' strike, this time the festival is attracting a wealth of prominent names, from Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie and Julianne Moore to Jude Law, Kevin Kline, George Clooney and Brad Pitt.
The opening film, Tim Burton's remake of his own ‘Beetlejuice’ classic, reunites the cast from 36 years ago, Michael Keaton, Willem Defoe and Winona Ryder, bringing little else new, but doubling the title to ‘Beetlejuice - Beetlejuice’. However, it was Sigourney Weaver who was awarded a Lion of Honour and lent the evening the necessary glamour.
Pablo Larrain's Callas portrait ‘Maria’ was eagerly awaited on the Lido. Larrain, who made interesting films in Chile several years ago, has recently been focussing on female celebrities of the 20th century. After ‘Jackie’ with Natalie Portman as Kennedy's widow and ‘Spencer’ with Kristen Stewart as Lady Diana, he has now turned his attention to Maria Callas, with Angelina Jolie in the title role as a tragically conflicted diva in the last weeks of her life. Lost in dreams and nostalgia, she wanders through an autumnal, sepia-coloured Paris, accompanied by a camera team and an interviewer (Kodie Smit-McPhee).
In black and white flashbacks, we see the young Maria, poor and somewhat chubby, singing for German occupying officers in Athens in the 1940s. In 1949, we follow her artistic breakthrough at Venice's Teatro La Fenice and her subsequent rise to acclaimed stardom on the world's opera stages. Of course, Aristotle Onassis is not to be missed; with his obligatory glasses and cigar, being played flatteringly by the Turkish star Haluk Bilginer. Like Maria, he speaks surprisingly accent-free English. Although he had forbidden her to sing, refused to marry her and had already hit on Jackie during Kennedy's lifetime, Maria sits devotedly at his deathbed.
The ailing diva, who has not performed on stage for four years, is in search of her lost voice, putting excessive strain on her heart and liver. Even the devotion of her self-sacrificing butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) and her caring housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher in a grey wig) cannot stop her cruel fate. Like the tubercular Traviata, she meets an early death at the age of 53.
‘Opera is my life’ she tells the doctor, who admonishes her to take care of her health and be sensible. ‘Opera is not sensible!’ For the director, opera is above all a sequence of ‘great’ arias. This brings Pablo Larrain's trilogy of women full circle, which can be imagined as an oversized ‘Gala’ booklet for film and opera lovers.
In recent years, Venice has increasingly included documentary films in its programme. This year's impressive kick-off was ‘Separated’ by Errol Morris. The renowned filmmaker deals with the scandalous practice of separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents at the US-Mexican border. Officially denied by the Trump administration, the film uses numerous insider interviews to document the details of an inhumane practice designed to deter immigrants. Although this policy was corrected thanks to massive public protests, there was no new legal regulation under President Biden. On the contrary, the debate about illegal immigration has become a central election campaign issue, and Kamala Harris is also promising a policy ‘tough on immigration’.
Another highlight of the first few days was the documentary ‘One to One: John & Yoko’ by Kevin Macdonald. If you think you know everything about his post-Beatles time in New York, you will be surprised to discover a charismatic and politically radical John Lennon. Kevin Macdonald documents the only and last concert of the two in New York City. He also sketches a broad panorama of the political conditions in America in the early 1970s: Watergate and Richard Nixon's election victory in 1972, ex-governor George Wallace as a forerunner of Donald Trump, the protests against the Vietnam War and the hopes for a radical resistance movement supported by John Lennon.
John and Yoko first lived in a small flat in the West Village, which became a meeting place for left-wing non-conformists such as Jerry Rubin and Alan Ginsberg. Kevin McDonald reconstructed the place using photographs of the time. As John was becoming the target of FBI harassment he started to record his phone calls. A surprising source of historical material that the film makes public for the first time.
John and Yoko are avid TV viewers and appear in various TV debates. The film zaps through the American TV shows of the time in a highly amusing way, turning them into seismographs of the zeitgeist. John Lennon's emblematic anti-war song ‘Give Peace a Chance’ evokes wistful memories of the collective resistance to the Vietnam War. A resistance that is missed today, when slogans such as rearmament and ‘’fitness for war‘’ are back in fashion.