12 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
By Nick James
Before Venice opened, it looked as if the festival
story would be about its lamentable lack of
films by women. Only two were selected for the
Competition: Haifaa al-Mansour’s Saudi Arabian
political campaign film The Perfect Candidate and
Shannon Murphy’s melodrama Babyteeth, about a
teenage girl finding a new zest for life in the face
of death. Festival director Alberto Barbera seemed
to exacerbate the issue, not only by arguing that
quality had to be his selectors’ only criterion, and
saying that he’d wanted but failed to get Kelly
Reichardt’s First Cow (which went to Telluride),
but also by choosing films made by men who’ve
been convicted of, or accused of, sexual crimes
- specifically, Roman Polanski, in Competition
with An Officer and a Spy, whose rape case is
well known; and Nate Parker, whose American
Skin was chosen for the Sconfini section of six
Italian-backed films and who had been charged
with rape as a student in 1999 but acquitted.
When it came to the real event, however,
#MeToo issues did not predominate, at least not
among the many critics I spoke to. Venice is an
upside-down world compared to Cannes. Here,
for instance, the Netflix logo is cheered. Of the
previously mentioned films only Polanski’s and
Murphy’s became talking points and neither lasted
long as hot topics on the ground. That heat was
reserved almost exclusively for the Golden Lion
winner, Todd Phillips’s Joker. In particular, one
negative review by Time magazine’s Stephanie
Zacharek, in which she said that Joaquin Phoenix’s
astonishing incarnation of the Joker “could
easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels”,
sparked a bitter social media storm that rages on
a week later as I write. Joker is a richly textured
and deliberately ambiguous super-villain origin
story that deals with male violence and mental
illness with great flair, albeit in the expected
grim graphic novel manner, yet Zacharek’s
interpretation is a fascinating one to read. There’s
more to be read about Joker elsewhere in this
issue (see page 32), so I’ll just leave it there.
What these controversies did was create a
slightly jumpy mood of distrust, with people
checking each other’s opinions in a way I haven’t
seen since Twitter first arrived. And yet Polanski’s
film seemed to go largely unscathed – it won the
Jury Prize despite jury president Lucrecia Martel’s
evident unease at having to deal with it – and
American Skin won its section’s award. Whatever
his motivation in making An Officer and a Spy –
and some critics have credibly suggested there’s
an allegory to be found in its tale of an innocent
man facing persecution – Polanski takes the
subject extremely seriously. Like Robert Harris’s
source novel, the narrative is based on the facts
of the Dreyfus case in France in 1894, in which
a Jewish officer was wrongfully imprisoned for
treason. But knowing this historical background
is no spoiler as the film’s narrative pleasure lies
in how the falsity of the evidence against Dreyfus
is discovered, almost by accident, by new head
of the security service Georges Picquart (the
excellent Jean Dujardin), who’s up against the
colleagues who had seen Dreyfus convicted in
the first place. The film’s tone is sad, downbeat
and hard-faced. Polanski has always been a deft
choreographer of procedural drama. He knows
the importance of objects as well as dialogue, and
how to make a film feel natural, despite 19th-
century military costume. If you’re prepared to
take the ‘never trust the artist, trust the work’
position, as I tend to do, the film’s pretty good.
Being fondest above all of providing a constant
VENICE
Festivals
Contentious as some of the choices
may have been, this year’s festival
has lit the fuse for the Oscars with a
series of towering performances
Tunnel of love: Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver struggle to maintain a relationship that’s going off the rails, in Noah Baumbach’s superb Marriage Story
What Venice’s controversies
did was create a jumpy mood
of distrust, with people eagerly
checking each other’s opinions
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Festivals: Venice, 1
