In Contention

Tag: Black Venus

  • VENICE: Jury duty – award predictions and preferences

    The Venice Competition lineup officially wrapped today with one of its lightest and most mainstream selections, “Barney’s Version” (reviewed this morning).

    With only the out-of-competition closing film “The Tempest” left to screen before I head back to London tomorrow evening, allow me a moment to sift through the runners and riders for the festival prizes – at the same time as Quentin Tarantino and his (hopefully) merry band of jurors much be contemplating the same thing.

    They have good reason to be merry: as a friend and I agreed this morning, festival director Marco Mueller has assembled a truly outstanding Competition field this year – thoughtfully balanced in terms of highbrow and middlebrow, genre and esoterica, veteran auteurs and younger ascending talents.

    (More thoughts, plus Golden Lion predictions and wishes, after the cut.)

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  • VENICE: ‘Black Venus,’ ’13 Assassins,’ ‘Attenberg,’ ‘A Sad Trumpet Ballad’

    On my way to Tom Tykwer’s latest, so no time for an intro. Further rounding up highlights (and lowlights) of the Venice competition lineup:

    Expectations were appreciably high, and the press screening queue consequently doubled back on itself, for Abdellatif Kechiche’s historical drama “Black Venus” (**1/2) – after all, Kechiche had a hit on the Lido three years ago with the excellent “The Secret of the Grain,” and for those who know it, the story he’s working with here seemed overdue for screen treatment. By the time the credits rolled on this hard, dense, 165-minute slap of a movie, however, applause was more scattered than one might have expected for a display of such voluminous craft and ambition; the silence, one suspects, was that of an audience assessing which lines had and hadn’t been crossed.

    For my part, I remain stuck in a halfway house between immense appreciation that Kechiche has brought the extraordinary story of Saartjie Baartman, the black South African maid whose unusual physique (and genitalia) briefly made her the toast of the European vaudeville circuit in the 19th century, to the screen; and regret that he’s chosen to tell it in such a way that the film becomes complicit in the objectification it claims to decry.

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  • 11 days in Venice

    In a few hours’ time, a shiny and sensibly priced orange plane will whisk me off to the city of water, romance and the most expensive fleapit hotels this side of, well, anywhere for my second consecutive dive into the Venice Film Festival. Truth be told, I’m not quite ready for it… a surfeit of pre-travel errands has meant I’m still leafing through the fest’s vast 62-page press screening schedule, still trying to cobble out some semblance of an itinerary.

    A neat, contained festival preview, therefore, wasn’t really on the cards: I tried to narrow things down to a “10 most anticipated” list, but I’m far too hungry for the entire buffet to limit myself to that.

    In its place, then, I offer an indication of what the festival is serving up on a day-by-day basis; not only will you get an idea of when, in the next fortnight, your own horse in this race will come to attention, but you can also see some of the cineaste’s Sophie’s choices that lie ahead of me.

    My scribbly Venice calendar after the cut.

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