The most invigorating surprise of this year’s Venice Film Festival, which ended last Saturday, was the return to form of Bernardo Bertolucci, who gave us I Sognatori, or The Dreamers, a swooning love letter to Paris, to cinema and to love.
Since Last Tango in Paris in 1972 Bertolucci has had a reputation for showing obsessive sex in claustrophobic, enclosed spaces and this is a distant cousin to that fantasy, though coloured with innocence and idealism.
The Dreamers is a ménage àtrois in a very French vein: Michael Pitt is an American boy who comes to Paris in the turbulent late 1960s and becomes a devoted cinephile. He befriends a beautiful twin brother and sister, Theo and Isabelle (played by newcomers Louis Garrel and Eva Green).
They invite him to stay in their rambling city apartment while their parents are away in the country, and soon the three of them simply never leave, babes in an erotic wood of their own construction, ignoring the history being made out in the streets.
The Paris conjured by Bertolucci and his production designer Jean Rabasse is not disgraced by the movie’s ample quotations from celluloid classics.
As for Emma Thompson and Antonio Banderas in Christopher Hampton’s Imagining Argentina — well, what can I say about something destined to be a cult classic of awfulness?
Imagining Argentina is an excruciatingly misjudged attempt to impose a layer of occult spirituality on an important political subject: the abduction and murder of 30 000 dissidents by the fascist Argentine junta in the 1970s and 1980s.
Banderas plays a theatre director; his journalist wife is played by Thompson, complete with Spanish accent. She is taken away by the sadistic secret police and then Banderas discovers he has the clairvoyant power to see what is happening to all the ”disappeared ones”.
The spectacle of Banderas exercising his sensitive magic powers, intercut with Thompson getting horribly raped and beaten — with close-ups on her droll, quizzical face contorted in agony — is truly wince-making.
The mystical spin on real-life political tragedy may have worked in the original novel, but here, defying tyrants while being away with the fairies just doesn’t work.
Halfway through the festival, however, and after a slow start, things looked distinctly promising. And it was that old festival favourite Takeshi Kitano — actor, writer, TV personality and director — who livened everyone up.
If Woody Allen’s Anything Else, in which he more or less plays himself, opened the festival with a minor flourish, Kitano’s Zatoichi, which might best be described as the first samurai musical, had the press cheering.
Inspired by the 1962 Kenji Misumi classic about a blind swordsman, it has Kitano as the white-haired veteran samurai who is still capable of dispatching a dozen assailants just by listening to their moves. The fights are as funny as they are bloody, but Kitano’s best trick is to accomplish the shafts of humour without turning the melodrama into mere parody.
Another hot ticket was the Coen brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty, a star-studded screwball that had its audience baying approval during its first half, but couldn’t quite sustain the enthusiasm during its second.
Hailed as the brothers’ most commercial offering yet, it seems likely to please their legion of fans without getting quite as far with mainstream audiences as something such as Fargo. Perhaps the screenplay is a little too clever for its own good, piling on so many jokes in each sequence, many of them visual, that a certain indigestibility kicks in.
Shortly afterwards came a debut film certain to gain an award. Snaffled from under the annoyed nose of the Locarno festival, Andrej Zvjagintsev’s The Return is an outstanding first film that must have a favourite’s chance of at least one prize.
It is about two boys who live in poverty with their mother and suddenly find their long-absent father has returned home. This is a class film and put some of the bigger, more publicised movies here to shame. — Â