8 Takeaways from the 2024 Venice Film Festival
The 2024 Venice Film Festival is over, leaving behind it the surprise Golden Lion win for Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” from the Isabelle Huppert-led jury. The end-of-life drama, starring Tilda Swinton as a cancer-stricken war photographer who chooses to euthanize herself with the help of a friend played by Julianne Moore, received polarized reviews out of Venice and was liked by many but loved by few. The movie just played well at the Toronto Film Festival. This is the first Golden Lion win for Almodóvar, and Sony Pictures Classics has the film, which means Oscar prospects are in view.
But well before the awards, the nearly two-week-long festival provided us with a handful of observations about the state of movies as reflected through the festival system, which is crucial for the support of and exposure for movies to begin with. We are hardly done with the fall festivals, as Toronto is not even half over, and we still have New York, AFI, and many more to come, but Venice, similar to Cannes back in May, set an early tone for the rest of the season.
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Here are eight takeaways from our time on the Lido.
TV Is Here to Stay at Film Festivals
Similar to Cannes this year, La Biennale had a slower start to the point where the idea that “Disclaimer,” the new limited series from two-time Best Director winner Alfonso Cuarón and Apple TV+, was the best film anyone had seen the first couple of days was not unheard of. That the drama starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, about a documentarian confronted by her dark past when a mysterious new novel paints her in a negative light, was received so well at a festival so focused on making sure cinema continues is indicative of how the film and TV mediums are blending.
Sure, Cuarón said he treated the project as a film, but “Disclaimer” was exhibited over two nights, like a primetime TV event. And he was not the only big name to take a series to the festival. Oscar-winning Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg and stalwart British director Joe Wright premiered their new projects “Families Like Ours” and “M. Son of the Century,” respectively, so the festival’s continued embrace of long-form storytelling is helping it bring in more notable talent, with a track record of quality projects that show Venice still has great taste outside of traditional cinema. —MJ
So Is the Venice Film Festival Itself
We are but two people, so we were not able to attend every screening to keep an exhaustive tally, but by the third mention of Venice in a third straight screening at the festival itself, it became almost comical how much it looked like the festival made programming decisions off whether or not the host city received a shoutout.
To be fair, the mentions of Venice were meaningful to the narrative, from Angelina Jolie, in character as Maria Callas, remembering a time she was her happiest in “Maria” to “The Brutalist” staging an epilogue filmed on location. Also, this runs parallel to the significant number of films that have a character in their own movie’s title, from obvious instances like “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” to more subtle nods like in “Queer” and “The Room Next Door.” —MJ
Stars and Studios Are Fine to Delay Festival Press
At the jury press conference early on at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, Italian journalists sounded ready to stage a revolt. One woman, speaking on behalf of the feelings of many in the room, confronted artistic director Alberto Barbera with a question about why almost none of the major films have press junkets this year, an inquiry he quickly brushed off.
But it’s true: Venice is way more publicized than Telluride, which it often overlaps with, yet journalists have to go through all sorts of hoops they would not need to at that festival to get even the tiniest interview. It is known that international press is prioritized, given that American journalists will have access to many of these filmmakers throughout awards season, but try to find any interviews for something like “The Brutalist” or “The Order.” They just did not really happen. —MJ
Awards Buzz Is Premature – This Festival Barely Produced Any Oscar Contenders
In the end, the 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival mostly bred Best Actress contenders, from Angelina Jolie in “Maria,” to Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in “The Room Next Door, to Volpi Cup winner Nicole Kidman in “Babygirl.” Sadly, “Joker: Folie à Deux” was not the Lady Gaga Oscar campaign launch we were all looking for — it would be a stretch to even follow its predecessor into one of the 10 Best Picture nomination slots if reviews out of its world premiere are any indication.
The Golden Lion going to Pedro Almodóvar’s first English language feature reads as a career achievement more than an achievement for the specific film, though one cannot count out a film as a Best Picture contender when it wins that award. Though only half of the winners from the past decade went on to be Best Picture nominees, two (“The Shape of Water” and “Nomadland”) won the Best Picture Oscar. Not bad odds.
Ultimately, the film that did read as an Oscars contender across the board was a bit unexpected. “The Brutalist,” by writer/director Brady Corbet, was initially perceived as a slog based on its three-and-a-half-hour runtime and logline about an architect emigrating to America after WWII, but the majority of people who saw the recent A24 acquisition were impressed. The Silver Lion award for the filmmaker does feel like it seals the deal on the film being an Oscar contender even more than some of the anticipated titles going into the festival, like “Queer” and “Maria.” —MJ
Sex Is Back at the Movies Again, Again
Every year, it feels like we get another platitude about there being too much sex in the movies (“Poor Things”) or sex being back at the movies (again, “Poor Things”), and often in the same sentence about the same project. The Venice Film Festival in 2024 indeed brought sexiness back to the big screen (I would hardly call last year’s “Poor Things” out of Venice sexy, but perhaps just sexually graphic), with particular thanks to Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” and its hot scenes of Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey rolling around in bed, sucking and fucking.
The actors, at the film’s press conference, didn’t make a fuss about the scenes, and Starkey even went on to suggest that American audiences are a bit prudish when it comes to sex scenes on the big screen while similar content is perfectly fine to be consumed on our phones. In a moment where people seem to be willingly having less sex than ever, movies like “Queer” suggest an alternative argument in favor of not losing sight of our sensuality. Then, of course, was “Babygirl,” Halina Reijn’s sexy erotic thriller-comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a high-powered robotics executive having an affair with a younger intern, played by Harris Dickinson. Kidman gets next to naked in the film, which features the actors in all manner of S&M sex positions and overall focuses on the “orgasm gap” (Reijn’s words) between men and women. —RL
Filmmakers and Film Festivals Want Longer Movies — Do Audiences?
Brady Corbet hauled 300 pounds of film and in 26 canisters to the Lido for the world premiere of “The Brutalist,” which clocks in at a staggering 215 minutes. Corbet said at the film’s press conference that critics of his third feature’s running time need to get over themselves. A24 buying the film after its last-minute, sold-out, single screening at the Toronto International Film Festival portends a serious investment in exhibiting “The Brutalist” as intended: in 70mm, as Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley shot the epic in VistaVision, and with a 15-minute intermission.
There were few movies under two hours at Venice this year, from “Joker: Folie à Deux” at 138 minutes to “Queer” at 130 (and not at nearly three hours as originally suggested by Alberto Barbera) to Belgian director Fabrice du Welz’s “Maldoror,” about his country’s real-life ’90s child serial killer and body trafficker Marc Dutroux, at 155 minutes.
Then, of course, you have Alfonso Cuarón saying his five-and-a-half-hour Apple TV+ miniseries “Disclaimer” is more of a movie. Filmmakers want to be afforded the sprawl and scope of a limited series — the storytelling mode du jour as audiences continue to back away from the big screen, as much as film culture appears to be thriving this year compared to the last one and the one before that. But they also want the control of having your butt in a seat in movie theaters. “The Brutalist” is an Oscar contender, yes, but is it a movie for the real people in the world? I question if casual moviegoers or even the broadest swaths of more regular ones will turn up for a big-screen event of that scale, one that is potentially butt-numbing in its grandeur. —RL
The Race-to-the-Clock of Overnight High-Profile Festival Acquisitions Is Over
We’ve said this at other festivals, too, but generally speaking, the crush of an overnight blockbuster festival buy is no longer. The highest-profile buys of Venice didn’t even happen during the festival: Netflix bought “Maria” just before the 2024 edition kicked off, as did A24 with “Queer.” Then, A24’s acquisition of “The Brutalist” came post-Venice, during TIFF, though we’d heard filmmaker Brady Corbet was meeting with the company during La Biennale. The biggest buys during the actual festival were indies, like Utopia with Alex Ross Perry’s indie music documentary experiment “Pavements,” though that film came to the Orizzonti section with Utopia already on board as producers, so the sale was hardly a shock.
There are a number of buzzy projects and Venice award winners still on the hook for distribution, like Dea Kulumbegashvili’s “April,” produced by Luca Guadagnino. But that film — about an emotionally walled-off obstetrician conducting illegal abortions in a remote Georgian village — is so aggressively anti-commercial that I can’t see it landing anywhere but MUBI, the home of Kulumbegasvhili’s last film, “Beginning.” Giovanni Tortorici’s feature debut, “Diciannove,” was also produced by Guadagnino. The Italian coming-of-age dark comedy has the potential to be an arthouse favorite — it’s back at bat for a buy at Toronto before pumping the brakes on its festival run as Tortorici enters prep for his next film.
Plus, the buzziest movies came to Venice with distributors already in place, from the “Joker” sequel to opener “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and “Wolfs.” Apple TV+’s Jon Watts-directed comedy starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney could’ve done major business in theaters; instead, the streamer is dumping it on the platform just a week after its theatrical launch in hopes of ginning up subscribers. —RL
Venice Is the Premier Launchpad for XR Content
As festivals like Sundance deprioritize virtual reality programming, the Venice Film Festival embraces extended reality more broadly. The Venice Immersive XR lineup gets its own home base on the Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio in the Venetian lagoon — an island that once served as a military outpost where plague victims were left to die. Sixty-three projects (including nearly half in competition) from 25 countries bowed on the island, spanning 360-degree videos, virtual and mixed reality, and XR works. A top prize winner included Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla’s “Impulse: Playing with Reality.” Narrated by Tilda Swinton, the 30-minute interactive documentary uses the Quest 3 headset to recreate a human mind with ADHD for participants.
Stephane Hueber-Blies and Nicolas Blies’ “Ceci Est Mon Coeur,” meanwhile, involves participants putting on a bespoke, luminescent jacket to experience a darkly soothing visual poem in motion on an immersive screen in a dark room. The producers behind that project will next take the project into broader distribution, in spaces accommodating 30 or so people for its 30-minute running time. The Venice Immersive XR lineup is regularly a great launching pad to get the word out for these projects as they ready for the world post-world premiere. And Venice certainly has the richest augmented and extended reality programming of any festival. —RL
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