“Oh, Christ, that means it’s going to be shit,” wailed a friend of mine, an ardent devotee of long-dormant American auteur Whit Stillman, when the director’s new film, “Damsels in Distress,” was announced as the Closing Night film of this year’s Venice Film Festival.
I consoled him that it needn’t be the case, but only half-heartedly. It’s an unwritten rule of major festival programming that the closing film should be, if not shit, at least aggressively mediocre — particularly at Venice, so as not to antagonize the hordes of journalists who have already departed for Toronto. God forbid they should be given a reason to stay.
Last year’s selection was certainly the kind that benefited from being seen by as few eyeballs as possible: Julie Taymor’s ghastly adaptation of “The Tempest” was both the nadir and epitome of festival closers, its ill fortunes seemingly cast in stone even before the critics stuck the boot in. The unfailingly literate, stylish Stillman couldn’t have made a film that bad, could he? Surely not. And yet why was Venice director Marco Mueller burying it at the end? And why was the first film in 13 years from this critics’ darling not in Competition?
“Why Venice and not Toronto?” a colleague asked when I mentioned I was heading to the Lido for the world’s oldest film festival for the third straight year. Given the North American bent of this site, it was a fair question, but also one I found easy to answer — and not just for the dully practical reason of relative airfare expense.
These days, so much media speculation precedes the announcement of any major festival lineup that the eventual unveiling comes almost as an anti-climax — or at least it would do if the long-expected films weren’t so appetizing in the first place. As was the case with the Toronto lineup on Tuesday, the just-revealed programme for this year’s Venice Film Festival is as heavy on highlights as it is light on surprises, and that’s good enough for this Lido-bound journo.