Finally consecrated, at the age of 74 and after twenty feature films: on Saturday 7 September, the jury of the Venice Film Festival, chaired by Isabelle Huppert, decided to award the Golden Lion to Pedro Almodóvar for The room next door.
Filmed for the first time in English and starring actresses Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, this drama follows the reunion of two friends, one a novelist and the other a war reporter, against the backdrop of illness. In a sad irony, Tilda Swinton’s character suffers from incurable cancer and decides to arrange her death by finding the right pill on the dark web.
We find in this film the twilight concerns that the Spanish filmmaker has already deployed, especially in Pain and Glory (2019). On such a serious subject, the tandem of actresses manages to create a tender atmosphere, never morbid, sometimes even enhanced with a certain humor. However, the film retains that classicism and that polished image that sometimes leaves you distanced, so the flashback that shows the reporter on the ground in Iraq is quite implausible.
The Silver Lion, Grand Jury Prize, was awarded to another drama, this one pastoral, russetFrom the Italian Maura Delpero: during the Second World War, the story follows the daily life of a large family, in a village perched in the Italian mountains, which welcomes with varying degrees of kindness two deserters. The camera focuses on the actions of the siblings, especially the sisters, whose desires for independence will not all be satisfied. Delicate, examining the sexual emotions of the two eldest and the guilt that accompanies them, russet It suffers from the limits of its own programme, those of a film about emancipation, whose roots we can guess from the close-ups.
The award for best achievement went to The brutalistFrom American actor and director Brady Corbet, a two-part (over three hours) epic that traces the life of architect Laszlo Toh: a Hungarian-born Jew and survivor of a concentration camp, who tries to rebuild his life in New York. The film follows the ups and downs of this American dream, which for a while seems like a fairy tale when a wealthy landowner takes him and his family under his wing and entrusts them with a major construction project. The descent will be bitter. The epic has breath but its aesthetics do not escape grandiloquence, as does the exuberant interpretation of Adrien Brody, which can be exhausting.
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