November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 13
NICK JAMES’S TOP FIVE
1 Joker Todd Phillips’s pitch-black Golden
Lion-winning supervillain origin story,
starring Joaquin Phoenix (below).
2 Marriage Story Noah Baumbach’s fierce
and funny portrait of a couple in free-fall.
3 Martin Eden Pietro Marcello’s audacious
adaptation of a Jack London novel
about an aspiring young writer.
4 About Endlessness Master of the absurd
Roy Andersson’s latest deadpan comic tale.
5 An Officer and a Spy Roman Polanski’s
gripping exploration of injustice and anti-
Semitism during the Dreyfus scandal in 1894.
stream of movie stars, Venice never turns its
nose up at even the stodgiest of star-driven
historical dramas. But the best of these turned
out to have a lesser-known Italian star in the lead,
Luca Marinelli, in Pietro Marcello’s uneven but
audacious adaptation of the Jack London novel
Martin Eden. This was easily the most stylistically
distinctive film in competition, shot on 16mm
and seamlessly incorporating real archive material
both as mise en scène and as dream material. The
titular Martin is here an Italian sailor who saves a
rich kid from a beating and then woos his artistic
sister Elena (Jessica Cressy), much against the
family’s wishes. Marinelli pulls off the difficult
trick of playing against type as a handsome
lunk in the role of the tortured unpublished
writer – he won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor.
Covering the history behind Shakespeare’s
Henriad plays without quoting him while
radically altering the fate and characterisation
of Falstaff are the good ideas in David Michôd’s
The King, in which delicate-looking Timothée
Chalamet somewhat implausibly plays town
drunk Prince Hal as he morphs into fierce
fighter King Henry V. It’s mostly a typically
plodding history film, but Chalamet comes
into his own in the terrific Agincourt battle
scenes of heavily armoured French nobility
floundering in the mud, wriggling over and
about them like a lithe and deadly serpent.
Another historical drama that comes on strong
but slips through your fingers like silk, Lou
Ye’s Saturday Fiction, flashes its monochrome
finery provocatively, employing a fast-moving
camera to capture its ancient cars and 1940s
Shanghai costumes. Gong Li stands at the centre
of a self-reflexive tale with the looks of a great
romantic spy drama, but one more interested
in its furniture than in intriguing us. Ninety
minutes of figuring out who is playing for
which of the three main governments – two
rival Chinese and the Japanese invader – left
me wiser but not particularly engaged.
Václav Marhoul’s adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s
1965 novel The Painted Bird also takes place
during wartime but couldn’t have been further
in tone from Saturday Fiction. It’s three hours’
worth of vileness inflicted on the unnamed
Jewish boy (Petr Kotlár) at its centre and others
around him. Hardened as I am to cinematic
depictions of atrocity – and I wish I wasn’t – my
main objections to this film are actually to
its flimsy sketchlike succession of events, its
borrowing of the aesthetic world of Béla Tarr’s
Sátántangó et al, and its wearying dance with the
audience’s expectations of the unwatchable.
To turn from The Painted Bird to any film feels
absurd and tasteless, so why not turn to that
master of the absurd Roy Andersson. Anyone
who has seen one of his ‘Living Trilogy’ films
will recognise the whey-faced people in About
Endlessness. They’re mostly in their later
years, wear pale colours and recite mordant,
deadpan lines in front of bare, atmosphere-free
locations that evoke Scandinavian paintings.
As before, events from military history and/
or characters’ nightmares sometimes intrude.
Yet About Endlessness is different. The sketches
here do not push so hard for absurdity. They
lean on banal lives in a new way that’s not
as funny, yet is freer from condescension,
giving his cinema a more inclusive feel.
It was delightful too to see a film as surprising as
Pablo Larraín’s Ema, as fragmentary and disordered
in its approach to storytelling as its titular
character is to reassembling her life. Ema (wraith-
like, magnetic Chilean actor Mariana Di Girolamo)
is a dancer in a coastal town in Valparaiso who’s
pining for Polo, the adopted son she had to give
back after he caused a fire that disfigured her sister-
in-law’s face. Ema has separated from her mild-
mannered choreographer husband Gastón (Gael
García Bernal) because he insisted they give the
boy back. But while Gastón has gone into his shell,
Ema’s way of dealing with her anguish is to throw
herself into street-dancing, sexual relationships
and acts of minor vandalism with a flamethrower
(as you do). It’s amazing how well these dance and
facility-burning scenes act as counterpoints to
the undertow of Ema’s melancholy emptiness.
I arrived in Venice too late to see The
Perfect Candidate, so of the female-directed
Competition films I only saw Murphy’s feature
debut Babyteeth. Drawn from a play by its
screenwriter Rita Kalnejais, it’s a moving, if
occasionally oversweet, portrait of Milla (Eliza
Scanlen), a young woman coming of age and
falling in love, as inappropriately as she should,
with itinerant youth Moses at the same time
as she is dealing with cancer. Toby Wallace
won the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Best
Young Actor for his performance as Moses.
Joker aside, Venice’s best moment came at the
end of Noah Baumbach’s excellent fierce and
funny study of the agonies of divorce, Marriage
Story. It involves Adam Driver ‘performing’, but I
don’t want to spoil it for you. Marriage Story does
a brilliant job of preserving its love for the New
York theatre world represented by Driver’s stage
director Charlie while critiquing its obsession
with lone genius; it’s also super-sympathetic
towards the pressures of choosing between LA
stardom and theatre authenticity as represented by
Scarlett Johansson’s actor Nicole. The film is split
into two halves. The first keeps a perfect balance
between the two sides, with both parties still in
love despite the impossibility of their marriage
lasting. But the raw second half edges sympathy
towards Charlie’s dilemma, even after establishing
his essential selfishness. It’s a trick of emphasis
that festival director Barbera too seems to have
pulled off. By hosting Driver, Phoenix, Dujardin
(and maybe Marinelli too), Venice played its hand
in the coming year’s Oscar games. As he skipped
down the steps in his Sinatra suit after the awards,
you could almost hear him singing ‘My Way’.
The King is reviewed on page 54 and Joker
on page 70
A kiss before dying: Eliza Scanlen in Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth
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Festivals: Venice, 2
