8 1GT Monday September 7 2020 | the times

Housebound

Hollywood

lets Venice

take the lead

The socially distanced film festival has

started triumphantly — even without

the American stars, says Kevin Maher

pad” for Tinseltown Oscar campaigns

(last year it was Joker and Marriage

Story), which has also meant that it is

often hijacked by Hollywood stars, by

their ambitions and by their crappy

movies (last year it was Brad Pitt

with Ad Astra and Meryl Streep with

The Laundromat). This year the festival

had room to breathe. Other names,

other movies have risen to the top.

In this freer, looser festival London’s

Vanessa Kirby (Princess Margaret in

The Crown, seasons one and two)

triumphed with two daring and

original movies about women pushed

to their emotional and physical limits.

The first was Pieces of a Woman

({{{{(), which co-stars Shia

LaBeouf and Sarah Snook, in which

Kirby plays Martha, a heavily

pregnant woman who begins the film

in the throes of labour while preparing

for a home birth. What unfolds is an

unbroken 30-minute sequence that

depicts the final labour stages, right up

to the birth (Martha’s first), with the

kind of woozy, dread-inducing and

pulse-quickening attention to detail

that has simply never been committed

to a fiction film before.

LaBeouf’s character, Sean, is

panic-stricken yet excited, Martha is

fearful, nauseous (she belches a lot)

and groaning through the pain, while

the furtive attempts of the midwife

(Molly Parker) to monitor the baby’s

heartbeat tell you that something isn’t

quite right. Like the aerial heist that

opened The Dark Knight Rises, it’s a

profoundly thrilling (and disturbing)

beginning, from which the subsequent

film, although duly impressive, never

quite recovers.

Kirby is also magnificent in

the second, The World to Come

({{{{{), a revamped western set

in upstate New York in 1856 that

describes the slowly unfolding

romantic relationship between two

disaffected farmers’ wives. Katherine

Waterston plays the taciturn Abigail,

who is grief-stricken after losing a

child to diphtheria and whose

marriage to the kindly but limited

Dyer (Casey Affleck, also a producer)

is crumbling into insignificance when

she meets her new and vivacious

neighbour Tally (Kirby). Directed by

the Norwegian film-maker Mona

I

think Tilda Swinton said it best

when, standing on stage and

addressing the glamorous

formal throng at the Venice

Film Festival’s opening night

ceremony, she cooed, “It’s so

beautiful to see all your eyes!”

That’s because the surrounding

faces, obviously, were hidden by

masks, with the distances between

them rigorously maintained (the

festival’s Sala Grande venue cut down

from 1,031 to 518 available seats).

Swinton was there to pick up a lifetime

achievement award, but she seemed

genuinely overwhelmed that in this

grimly dehumanising year of festival

cancellations (Cannes was axed) and

depressing Zoom replacements (the

upcoming Toronto and London

festivals will be mostly online) Venice

had dared to imagine the impossible

— real people, real connections, real

life. “I would like to thank our sublime

Venice,” she added. “The most

venerable and majestic film festival on

Earth for raising her banner this year.”

The banner raising, of course, comes

at a cost. There are police-controlled

thermal body scanners at nine

different entrance points to the festival

“compound” on the Lido. The scanner

routine is followed by a personal anti-

terrorism once-over (mobile metal

detectors, all belongings emptied out,

and a search so refined, through

covers and cases, that at first I thought

they were actually looking for Covid

microparticles). Masks, naturally, are

compulsory everywhere, indoors and

out, and screenings are patrolled by

festival minions who ensure that all

nostrils remain fully covered.

The other noticeable change,

inevitably, is the absence of

housebound Hollywood, although this

is not necessarily a bad thing. Venice

has increasingly become the “launch

Almost 50 per

cent of films

here are directed

by women

Fastvold, the film depicts our heroines’

tentative, yearning and ultimately

erotic romance (Kirby and Waterston

have white-hot chemistry) within an

environment that’s predatory and

lethal (children burn down in houses,

Tally’s husband kills dogs). The

discovery of their relationship,

we know, will spell doom for both

parties — there is low-level tension

thrumming away through the second

half of the film.

It’s been a strong year for women at

the festival (almost 50 per cent of the

competition films are directed by

women), and few appear stronger than

Romola Garai, who takes by the horns

the title role of Miss Marx ({{{(()

and dominates practically every scene.

Rarely off camera, she plays Eleanor

Marx, daughter of Karl, in a

straightforward period biopic with

flashes of brilliance. Near the end, for

instance, Eleanor takes two huge puffs

of opium, the soundtrack fills with the

raucous beats of the Rhode Island

punk rockers Downtown Boys’ I’m

Enough (I Want More) and the

formerly self-contained 19th-century

heroine performs a freak-out dance

around her Regent’s Park townhouse.

Fastvoldthefilmd it h

arts