“The Young Pope”
Of all the signs that we’re living in a Golden Age of TV, there are few clearer than the fact that one of the best films in Venice, a showcase for the most artistically impressive films in any given year, is not a film at all. Paolo Sorrentino‘s “The Young Pope,” starring a career-best Jude Law, has small screen elements to be sure (the occasional CG is not quite as polished and the arcs not as contained as we’d expect of a movie per se), but for sheer storytelling brio and imagination, it puts many a more classically cinematic title to shame, and several times over gave Venice some of its most memorable images. Mainly though, the first two episodes tease a deliciously dark and portentous story, as young, iconoclastic but also uber-traditionalist and autocratic Pope Pius XIII, aka Lenny (Law), negotiates his first few weeks in power with an icy ambiguity which might be touched by the diabolical or inspired by God. Or both. [Review here]
“The Age of Shadows”
As always, there were some titles that felt unfairly misplaced in the Venice lineup, and along with “One More Time With Feeling” (which was presumably excluded from the competition because it was a documentary, despite the inclusion this year of the far less inspired non-narrative “Spira Mirabilis” and Terrence Malick‘s “Voyage Of Time“), our own “why was this sidelined?” award goes to Kim Jee-woon‘s completely terrific period Korean spy caper. The director made a misstep with his Hollywood foray “The Last Stand,” but “Age of Shadows” feels like the work of a filmmaker truly coming into his own, topping even his previous hits like “I Saw the Devil” and “The Good, The Bad and the Weird” for brilliant craft and directorial invention at every turn. It’s a convoluted and fast-moving story, and perhaps the backdrop of the Korean independence struggle might seem arcane, but even if you know nothing about the country’s history and are totally lost in the thicket of betrayals and double-agent plotting, the brilliance of the filmmaking, which tumbles helter-skelter from one extraordinary set piece to the next, is wildly impressive. [Review here]
Honorable mentions:
Tom Ford‘s “Nocturnal Animals” [review here] is a lot of fun whenever it isn’t trying to be anything more than a lot of fun; Ulrich Seidl’s documentary “Safari” turns the Austrian filmmaker’s coldly formalist, dispassionately judgmental eye onto a group of big-game hunting tourists and is the perfect corrective if you ever find yourself thinking that human beings are an okay species; Australian first-timer Ben Young turns in an impressively grimy, stylized calling card for bigger things with “Hounds of Love” [review here]; Spanish actor-turned-director Raul Arévalo also impresses with his directorial debut “The Fury of a Patient Man” (which won Best Actress in the Horizons section for Ruth Diaz) [my review for Variety is here]; Stephane Brizé‘s Maupassant adaptation “A Woman’s Life” becomes too miserable by its end but is otherwise an impressively contemporary-feeling take on period drama; and Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Silver Lion-winning “Paradise” is sold out by a dreadful finale, but otherwise takes a well-acted, unusual approach to its Holocaust story.
Worst/Most Disappointing Films
Seeing as I managed to miss Wim Wenders’ widely panned “The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez,” Venice 2016 was a year of few absolute stinkers for me —with the possible exception of Emir Kusturica’s tiresomely overegged “On the Milky Road” (by which I mean literally overegged: there are a lot of eggs in it) [review here]. But there were certainly disappointments, and chief among them was Ana Lily Amirpour‘s “The Bad Batch” [review here] for which I had high hopes after enjoying “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” but which turned out to be oddly un-fun for a peri-Apocalyptic cannibal story. And then it won the Special Jury Prize, which shows you what I know.
Also disappointing, if that’s the right word for a film that is so very much exactly what you might expect, was Terrence Malick’s “Voyage of Time” [review here], in which even Cate Blanchett’s baked-cream voice can’t compensate for the flimsiness of what she’s saying and in which the labored-over visuals, without greater contextualization, begin to lose impact early —it’s a very lovely screensaver.
I am not a fan of James Franco‘s dreary Steinbeck adaptation “In Dubious Battle,” [review here] though I’ll admit he appears to be growing into a much more competent filmmaker, which also makes him more risk-averse and less interesting. And Mel Gibson‘s “Hacksaw Ridge” [review here, for which dozens of people seem to feel strongly I may go to hell, per the comments] made me uncomfortable because of its very competence. It’s a glossy and stirring story of heroism with some spectacularly gory battle scenes, yet it doesn’t just describe the religiosity of its real-life inspiration, which is an integral part of his story, but also uses his heroism as proof of God, which is not. I guess Hellfire awaits, which is probably preferable to sitting through the actual worst film I saw in Venice, the all-CG manga adaptation “Gantz: O” which I absolutely loathed, and you can read my Variety review of it if you want to know why.
So that’s it for another year from Venice, and a banner year it’s been. I’m filing this from Florence right now, and if I’m feeling slightly hard done by to be inside writing when one of the most beautiful Merchant-Ivory-approved cities in the world basks in sunshine on the other side of my window, I can hardly complain, having spent the past ten days in a room with a view, or rather various rooms with myriad views of life, the universe, and everything good that cinema in 2016 has to offer. Look out for a few more reviews straggling in in the days to come, but right now, I’m off to snog Julian Sands in a field. Arrivederci, and thank you for reading.