Venice Film Festival 2013: Planes, Boats and Mobiles

Our first report from the 70th Venice Film Festival: The Wind Rises, Night Move, Philomena and The Canyons

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 04 Sep 2013

It’s the 70th edition of the Venezia and maybe the old gal is starting to feel her age. Younger pretenders like Toronto and Telluride, the two festivals which overlap with Venice on the packed international festival calendar, increasingly steal her thunder and, in the case of 12 Years a Slave, the new film from Steve McQueen, whose first two films, Hunger and Shame, premiered on the Lido, its movies. When I arrive at the 2013 edition it’s three days in and the mood is muted; there are grumblings from critics that the films shown in competition so far (Joe, David Gordon Green; Via Castekkana Bandiera, Emma Dante; and Tracks, John Curran) haven’t been much cop, but luckily, there’s another septuagenarian in town on the day of my arrival who shows no signs of ring rust.

The Wind Rises (****), from master animator Hayao Miyazaki, takes a form unusual for a Studio Ghibli film: a biopic of a real person, in this case aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose innovative designs were appropriated to build the fighter planes that shredded Pearl Harbor. It’s a lyrical epic that manages to encompass Japan’s mid-war history as well as tell the intimate story of the professional and romantic life of a man driven by his love for messing about with planes.

What might prove controversial – surely a first for a Ghibli film – is the way in which Miyazaki downplays Japan’s involvement in the Second World War. His film seems to suggest his countrymen were merely pawns trying to bring their nation into the 20th century by partnering with German engineers. This would be fair criticism if this was a political movie, but it’s not. The Wind Rises is Miyazaki’s hymn to a fellow artist. Horikoshi dreams of flying but his eyes are too shortsighted to become a pilot, so he does the next best thing: he designs them. Miyazaki is clearly a kindred spirit – just look at his filmography for evidence. Flight, whether it’s on bi-planes (Porco Rosso), flying castles (Howl's Moving Castle, Castle in the Sky) or broomsticks (Kiki's Delivery Service ), is one of his a recurring themes and he renders it here with the same precision and care with which Horikoshi used rivets and alloy.

The day after screening it was announced that The Wind Rises will be Miyazaki’s final film. It’s a fine swan song and given how sentimental film-folk can be it stands a good chance of being among the prizes being handed out by Bernardo Bertolucci and his jury on Saturday (Silver Lion for best director, perhaps).

The title of Kelly Reichardt’s latest, Night Moves (**), must be a reference to Arthur Penn’s 70s film of the same name. They certainly share plenty of similarities: both involve shenanigans on boats; both concern male characters unable to communicate their feelings to the people they care for; both are marinaded in a fog of fatalism; and both have knockout endings. I would love to say both are masterpieces too, but unfortunately Reichardt’s film is the first major disappointment of the festival.

With her previous film, Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt took the western and bent the genre to her own sparse style. She, along with writer and regular collaborator Jon Raymond, attempts the same trick here with the paranoid thriller but gets tangled in its genre conventions. A trio of environmentalists (Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard) attempt to blow up a dam as a wakeup call to capitalist America who’ve “killed all the salmon just so they can run their iPod every fucking second of their lives.” The problem is these great actors seem to struggle with Reichardt’s stripped back approach and enigmatic script. Unlike Michelle Williams, the actor with whom Reichardt is most associated, their faces are unreadable, making their eco-warrior characters rather one note. Eisenberg in particular falters without his trademark smart-mouth fireworks.

Such verbal actors would be better suited to a vehicle like Philomena (****), Stephen Frears’ witty return to form. The premise couldn’t be more hokey. Based on true events, the film is an odd-couple road movie following smart aleck journo Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, giving off only the tiniest whiff of Partridge) as he investigates a human interest story (“they’re stories about the vulnerable and feeble-minded read by the vulnerable and feeble-minded,” quips Sixsmith when he’s first offered the job) about Philomena Lee, a little old Irish lady (Judie Dench) searching for the child she was forced to give up for adoption over 50 years ago after getting up the duff while training to be a nun.

Frears knows a tale this sweet needs plenty of sharpness. Instead of some sickly mismatched friendship forming (see The King’s Speech or Driving Miss Daisy), the class/age chasm between Philomena and Sixsmith remains uncrossed – in fact, a thin veil of prickly contempt hangs over the relationship til the final scenes. This salty-sweet flavour is enriched by a consistent flow of gags. Coogan had a hand in the screenplay, but generously he’s handed Dench most of the choice lines; take your gran to this and she’ll laugh like a drain. But what makes Philomena so winning is the sophisticated way in which it condemns the behavior of the Catholic church without denigrating people of faith – a delicate tightrope act that has given plenty of more high-minded films vertigo.

Talking of odd couples, The Canyons (***) – or Clash of the Auteurs – might be one of the most curious collaborations in film history. How did the legendary Paul Schrader, a writer and director interested in obsession (Obsession, Cat People, Raging Bull) and people on the edge of society (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper) end up working with Bret Easton Ellis, a novelist concerned with the exact opposite – the Less Than Zero writer’s favourite subject are the wealthy and the feckless? No matter the reason, the resulting film makes for a fascinating collision of sensibilities; a cinematic yin and yang, if you will.

Schrader shoots Ellis’s trashy erotic thriller with an icy grace, finding meaning in the (intentional) banality of its sub-soap opera dialogue. Lindsay Lohan plays Tara, a young woman caught in a deadly situation between her controlling movie producer boyfriend Christian (James Deen) and her actor ex Ryan (Nolan Funk), who she’s started sleeping with again after getting him the lead role in a slasher flick Christian’s bankrolling. In between the double crossing and ménage à troising, Schrader and Ellis slip in swipes at Hollywood and some heady themes about the death of cinema. There are also some allusions to the insidious nature of modern technology – barely a scene goes by, even the sex scenes, without someone checking their mobile. Having been blinded by the blue glow of fellow press delegates’ iPhones at every screening so far, I wholly concur with Mr Schrader and Mr Ellis’s thesis.

Venice International Film Festival runs from 28 Aug to 8 Sep http://www.labiennale.org