092 FEATURE
JOURNEYS Words by DAVID JENKINS Illustration by SOPHIE MO
Venice
s I would say to anyone who would listen, this was my first visit to
a film festival in 18 months. The reason for this self-imposed exile
was that I had recently become a father and, frankly, subsisting
on a diet of movies, carbs and coffee in a different country to my little
one did not greatly appeal. The sting of waving off my colleagues as they
headed to Cannes in May was intense but bearable. I wore a painted,
nervous smile as the rave reviews came rolling in for new films by
Terrence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Bong Joon-ho. I waited for the
FOMO to hit breaking point, but thankfully, it never really did. I was able
to see the situation with a measure of detachment: it’s fine, I’ll just catch
up with the Cannes competition later on sound of grinding teeth. At
time of writing, I’ve seen nine of 21.
Heading to Venice was strange, because I really missed my daughter,
and I wondered if that would make me more homesick, or I wouldn’t
be able to engage with the movies. The first film I saw was Haifaa al-
Mansour’s The Perfect Candidate, which was a little like slowly
descending into a warm bath when it came to re-energising with the
seamy world of film festivals. This story of a young female doctor who
decides to move into local politics in order to have a road fixed was warm
and engaging, and stimulating enough (though not too stimulating).
I remember coming out of the screening with a fuzzy glow, which
was maybe down to the film, but also feeling that I’d cleared the first
hurdle. And yes, I am aware that writing a piece about how dismal and
distressing mainlining movies for professional necessity while taking in
some autumn sun in continental Europe may not be that easy to relate to.
The point I’m trying to make is not about my fragile disposition, but on
the fear that a passion can be displaced, and that we’re only physically
able to truly care about one thing at a time. Okay, maybe not that, but that
we must rank our passions. Film festivals are about the films, but they’re
also about the excitement of being there, on the ground, reporting on
new work in the same way a news journalist would report on a crime
scene (apropos of nothing: Joker won the Golden Lion this year).
I was sad to be away from home, but I was also nervous that I
wouldn’t feel the spark of elation that I felt attending Cannes in 2007
and just being at the first screening of the Coens brothers’ No Country
for Old Men. You don’t become jaded through repetition, as every year,
without fail, there are phenomenal films being made. It’s because you
can only give so much of yourself over to these movies. The amount
you’re physically able to care is not diminished, but divided. This is a
country for old men.
It might be a stretch to say that James Gray’s Ad Astra, about an
astronaut played by Brad Pitt who has to travel to the rings of Neptune
to find his estranged father and prevent him from destroying Earth,
mirrored my own anxieties about being separated from my daughter
for a week, but I had no desire to punish anyone for my personal misery.
Aside from the sense of guilt that creeps in when you’re watching movies
while shirking domestic responsibility, there’s also the fact that you
also catastrophise and take storylines more personally. Watching Noah
Baumbach’s Marriage Story, about a custody battle fought between
Adam Driver’s east coast theatre director and Scarlett Johansson’s
west coast TV actor, it was hard not to process it as a grim pathway for
a potential future. And let’s not even mention Václav Marhoul’s The
Painted Bird, a masterful, three-hour monochrome dirge in which you
are forced to count the ways in which a small boy can be abused while
on a journey “home” during World War Two. It’s a fearless and brutal
depiction of man’s essential barbarity, but also his irrepressible survival
instinct, and you just hope against hope that nothing like it will happen
to anyone you knowA