Venice Film Festival 2024: The Good and the Great

Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera has been vocal about his ambition to launch movies that win Oscars and draw in Hollywood studios and stars – to the chagrin, no doubt, of cinephiles looking for loftier fare. Fortunately, in addition to highly anticipated premieres, such as Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), the festival’s 81st edition remains a place to experience cinema as an innovating art form and a mirror for urgent sociopolitical and cultural issues, as evidenced by the following noteworthy films:

Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari (2024), Massimo d’Anolfi and Martina Parenti

D’Anolfi and Parenti’s ambitious documentary asks viewers to abandon their anthropocentric view and, like natural scientists, see humanity’s existence on Earth’s timeline as merely a flash – or, rather, a glitch. As this film shows, our zeal for studying and cataloguing life forms, predominantly to use them in extractivist ways, is terrifying. The first part, for instance, compiles footage of the earliest-known films depicting animals being typically drugged, dissected or abused to advance medicine for studying group behaviour.

Part two follows the daily routines of biologists working at Padua’s botanical garden, at times accompanied by a voice-over reminding listeners that organic life, whose resistance and longevity far outstrips our own, will survive any manmade apocalypse. The final part returns to studies of group behaviour but, here, archival files documenting Italians deported to concentration camps during World War II for anti-fascist and socialist activities testify to how ideas extrapolated from biology were used to segregate, control and kill humans. As a whole, the film is as much a quiet condemnation of man’s extractivist attitudes as it is a cinematic dirge for humankind’s impending exit.

Une eau la nuit (Bodies of Water, 2024), Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin, Caroline Laurin-Beaucage

It’s more than half a century since the Venice Film Festival premiered Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970) – one of the sexiest movies ever made revolving around a swimming pool. While the 360-degree short Bodies of Water – screening as part of the Venice Immersive section, which features VR and expanded-cinema experiences – may not drip with the same erotic energy as Skolimowski’s tale of lust and poolside murder, it is certainly akin to that film’s luminous wonders.

I felt as if I were truly sitting at the bottom of a pool while dancers moved fluidly around me. The bodies drifting before my eyes, pliant against the water’s buoyancy, oscillated between being tangible in one moment and ghostly the next. Looking upwards during a film screening to face a mass of water enclosing me, pressing down, was breathtaking and claustrophobic – the most cinematic experience I’ll likely have this year in Venice.

And Their Children After Them (2024), Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma

When Louise Courvoisier’s pastoral docudrama Holy Cow (2024) premiered at Cannes Film Festival in May, festival director Thierry Frémaux stressed the scarcity of films depicting the French provinces. Courvoisier may have kicked off a new wave: the Boukherma brothers’ And Their Children After Them, based on the eponymous 2018 novel by Nicolas Mathieu, is a poignant, chiaroscuro-filled story of provincial boyhood.

In the summer of 1992, two socially awkward boys in a scrappy, boom-to-bust, steel-mining town yearn to lose their virginity. To impress his crush at a party, Anthony (Paul Kircher) picks a fight with another local youth, Hacine (Sayyid El Alami), and the two are locked in a revenge-fuelled bind that lasts into adulthood. Meanwhile, Anthony struggles with his father’s alcoholism and his own unrequited love for a girl from a more privileged family. With lush cinematography and a throbbing 1990s-rock soundtrack, this sweet yet melancholic film establishes the Boukherma brothers as passionate chroniclers of their generation’s increasing sense of socioeconomic entrapment.

Babygirl (2024), Halina Reijn

Hollywood struggles to tell complex stories about older women’s sexuality. This makes Venice’s main competition contender, Babygirl, by actress-turned-filmmaker Halina Reijn, highly refreshing. The film garners the undeniable star power of Nicole Kidman as Romy, an influential CEO undone by dark desires. With cheeky intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) daring Romy to embark on BDSM adventures, Kidman plays out kink scenes with a disarming mixture of vulnerability, hilarity and edginess.

The film is hampered by uneven writing and a rushed finale, in which Romy’s heart-wrenching revelations to her wounded husband (Antonio Banderas) about her psychological struggles are summarily brushed off. It is as if Reijn can’t decide whether to frame consensual kink as playful or, as the thriller genre might dictate, inherently dangerous. In this sense, Babygirl could have borrowed some of the earthiness of Anne-Sophie Bailly’s Mon Inséparable (My Everything), a debut in the festival’s Orizzonti (Horizons) section, in which Mona (Laure Calamy), a middle-aged single mother caring for her disabled adult son, rekindles her own sexual life as he leaves home.

The Brutalist (2024), Brady Corbet

Corbet’s epic historical drama, The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody, is one of the most highly anticipated films in the main competition, and likely to enter the Oscars race. Known for Vox Lux (2018), the director is no stranger to tales of rolling fortunes underpinned by violence; this time, he tells the story of Jewish-Hungarian architect László Tóth, who escapes war-torn Europe for America, where a megalomaniac magnate hires him to build a community centre.

The film’s sumptuous, piercingly atonal soundtrack makes industrial Pennsylvania, where it is set, seem like a hellish pit, while the lush cinematography highlights the quasi-spiritualist elegance of Tóth’s ambitious modernist designs. At more than three hours long, The Brutalist, at times meandering and over-indulgent, misses the opportunity to illuminate how the architectural style emerged from the chaos and destruction of war. Nonetheless, the film is uplifted by Brody’s flinty performance as a man broken by suffering, drug addiction and isolation, who never relinquishes his pride or his artistic vision.

_{Main image: Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma, And Their Children After Them, 2024, film still. Courtesy: Trésor Films and Chi-Fou-Mi Productions}