Our hot opinions, from the Mostra, on Master Gardener, All the beauty and the bloodshed and The Whale.
A few days after Catherine Deneuve, it was Paul Schrader’s turn to receive an Honorary Golden Lion for his entire career at the 79th Venice Film Festival. The screenwriter of Taxi Driver and director ofAmerican Gigolo has experienced a real return to critical and media grace in recent years. A resurrection that began right here, on the Lido, in 2017, with the presentation of First Reformed (which earned him shortly after his first Oscar nomination for screenplay). Then there was The Card Counteralso in competition at the Mostra, welcomed as a masterpiece by the filmmaker’s admirers (including Barack Obama, who had put it in his top 10 of the year).
Schrader came to Venice with a new film, Master Gardener, shown out of competition. He speaks of it as the end of an informal trilogy begun with First Reformedeven if, deep down, Schrader is still making the same film. Master Gardener looks like The Card Counterwhich looked like light sleeperwhich looked like American Gigolo… The film also opens, unsurprisingly, with the Schraderian image par excellence: that of a man, alone in his room-purgatory, putting his thoughts down in his diary… A descendant of the Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, one more, played this time by Joel Edgerton. Our anti-hero is a man with a violent past, a former neo-Nazi who works for his redemption by taking care of the magnificent garden of a great bourgeois organizer of charity galas (Sigourney Weaver). She will ask him to watch over her great-niece (Quintessa Swindell), mixed-race, a young girl who is a little lost, whom the gardener will help to get back on the right track by teaching her botany… Gardening serves here as a metaphor for the faith that we can place in the future, in the ability of fate to surprise us, in the same way that plants sometimes surprise the gardener by growing wherever they want, taking on unexpected hues. Gardening is also an art of staging, a way of ordering the chaos and the beauty of the world.
Less “sexy” than The Card Counter (who had for him the decor of casinos, his hypnotic rock soundtrack, and the star power of Oscar Isaac), the arid Master Gardener will not swell the ranks of the Schrader fan club. But it’s a rather touching film, deep, superbly dialogued (as very often with him), worked by an intense darkness, not trying to seduce (“This one, Obama won’t put it in his top 10“, laughed Schrader) but also underpinned by an unexpected optimism, a new sweetness. The septuagenarian Calvinist concluded his stay in Venice by saying that he was now going to tackle something different: a portrait of a woman. perhaps begin, who knows, with the image of a woman alone, in a room, putting down her thoughts in a diary…
Venice 2022: Noah Baumbach reinvents himself with White Noise
Laura Poitras, director of Citizenfour (the mind-blowing documentary on Edward Snowden), presented in competition All the money and the bloodshed : a portrait of Nan Goldin, the great photographer of the eighties New York underground, which we imagined to be a kind of “her life, her work”. It’s a bit like that, by the way, but augmented by an activist documentary, which details the action initiated by Nan Goldin against the Sacklers, a wealthy American family at the heart of the opioid scandal, accused of having caused a health crisis. monstrous by marketing a devastating painkiller, OxyContin, which caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States. With the PAIN group, Nan Goldin undertakes punch actions in the great museums of the planet, from the Guggenheim in New York to the Louvre, so that these cultural institutions henceforth refuse to cash the huge checks that are used to signing the Sacklers, who are also friendly patrons of the arts. By mixing the images of this fight with those of Goldin’s artistic and intimate journey, Laura Poitras draws the contours of an existence spent fighting against very powerful repressive American forces, yesterday’s Puritanism, the rapacity and impunity of the hyper- rich today.
Venice 2022: Romain Gavras electrifies the suburban film with Athena
The big event on Sunday evening was the presentation of the new Darren Aronosky, The Whalewith a resurrected Brendan Fraser, emerging from a long desert crossing (after small roles in the series The Affair and No Sudden Move of Soderbergh, and while waiting for the next Scorsese). He plays an obese man, weighing 270 kilos, a professor who gives writing lessons, online, from his sofa – a sofa that he almost never leaves, unable to move as he pleases, and from which he swallows tons of junk food, in a slow suicidal drift. Only one thing still seems to keep him alive: a dissertation, which he finds particularly well written, about Moby-Dick (it’s her, the whale of the title).
The film is adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his own play and fully assumes its theatrical nature, with its character entrances and exits seeming to arrive from behind the scenes (the hero’s teenage daughter, his nurse, a proselytizing believer who goes door-to-door -porte…) It is a rather unclassifiable film, torn between its “academic” dimension (that is to say: suitable to seduce the Academy of the Oscars) and a morbid, sinister, unpleasant aspect, reinforced by the claustrophobia of the square format. Much like George Miller did recently with Three thousand years waiting for you (but in a much less joyful way), Aronofsky seems to want to fit many of his personal obsessions (addiction, creation, religion, salvation) within the four walls of an apartment. Mother!, his previous film, was already behind closed doors, but which was turning into pandemonium. None of that here, but on the contrary a feeling of a deserted, bare, very sad world, which we can’t help but think brings back the image of an impeded, thwarted filmmaker, whose visions today have now struggling to unfold. There is of course also in this project a side The Wrestler (which had also earned the director a Golden Lion at the time): “small”, compact, with Brendan Fraser in the same position of “come-backer” as Mickey Rourke in 2009. An actor ready to renew the dialogue with the general public and the industry. Fraser is excellent, moreover, and the emotion that the film can arouse comes first from him. On this level, at least, The Whale succeeds in his bet.
We would love to give thanks to the writer of this post for this amazing content
Venice 2022: Paul Schrader celebrated, Nan Goldin angry and Brendan Fraser’s comeback