All eyes on the Venice Film Festival

The 2022 Venice film festival, offering an early hint at Oscar fever, was as much a celebration of life after Covid as it was about the movies.

Sydney Chandler, Gemma Chan and Florence Pugh attend the Don't Worry Darling red carpet at the Venice Film Festival. Picture: Getty Images

Not since George Clooney married leading barrister Amal Alamuddin has Venice been the home of the zeitgeist.

The 2022 Venice film festival was the panacea for all the pandemic’s cultural ills. Lockdowns, difficult filming conditions, downsized red carpets, premieres and award shows were a distant memory on and around the canals of Venice this week.

Akin to Cannes, Venice is also a precursory event to the Oscars – often predicting the following year’s Academy Award winners. Previous Venice blockbusters include Black Swan, La La Land and last year’s Spencer and Dune.

The timing this year also serves as an entree to next week’s Emmys. Unlike other European film festivals, Venice has embraced projects made by and distributed by streaming platforms, such as the highly anticipated Marilyn Monroe bio-pic made for, and by, Netflix, starring Ana de Armas.

The Andrew Dominik-directed film screened on Thursday night and the word from those who have already seen it is that it is very good – and ambitious – and that Armas will give Blanchett a run for her money in the acting stakes. Even before the festival, industry insiders were telling me Blonde would be the film of the festival.

However, the 2022 event itself could be a movie that may find itself being screened next year.

Spitting, celebrity spats, lengthy standing ovations and behind-the-scenes intrigue not only dominated the arts coverage, social media was glued to the action. Especially since that action involved the most famous singer-turned-actor of the moment, Harry Styles, who took a break from his world tour to attend the premiere of his new movie, directed by his rumoured girlfriend, Olivia Wilde.

Rarely is a press conference one of the most anticipated events of a film festival, especially the La Biennale di Venezia. But save for one magazine feature, Florence Pugh, 26, star of Don’t Worry Darling, has remained tight-lipped about the film.

Deadline reported Pugh’s absence in the (18-month) Don’t Worry Darling press cycle so far is due to scheduling conflicts with her filming for the second instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune franchise (where she’ll reunite with Timothée Chalamet after filming Little Women together). Given Chalamet is filming on the same production and still adhered to all press commitments for his film, Bones and All, earlier in the week in Venice, Pugh’s absence is considered a conspicuous move by critics.

Cate Blanchett in Venice. Picture: AFP

She made it only for the screening but arrived late with an Aperol Spritz in hand. The film was received with a five-minute standing ovation. Short, compared to others.

This year’s running theme throughout the entire festival was strong performances in mediocre productions.

Pugh’s performance as a housewife come undone was reliably immaculate, despite The Guardian UK’s Peter Bradshaw noting she “has not been interestingly directed” when compared to her work in Midsommar or The Falling.

It’s neither good nor bad; Vulture described it as “competent, and merely tedious” and Vanity Fair echoing that sentiment: “It isn’t a catastrophe, or an unqualified success.”

Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s Tar – which received a six-minute standing ovation – and Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All were early frontrunners for awards, but several other movies have proved they are very much in the running.

For Florian Zeller’s The Son, Hugh Jackman must surely be in contention for his emotional portrayal as Peter, father of the acutely depressed Nicholas, played by Melbourne’s Zen McGrath in what critics are calling an “indelible” portrayal. Deadline said the “gripping” film provides “a hell of a role” for Jackman.

Brendan Fraser is a frontrunner in the acting stakes for his portrayal in The Whale, a story of an obese, tortured gay man who is restricted to his apartment and reconnects with his daughter, played by Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink. The film also received six minutes of rapturous applause.

Adam Driver was a standout in White Noise, despite the film by Noah Baumbach – a Netflix-backed adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel – receiving a standing ovation that lasted “a tepid 150 seconds”, according to Variety.

As far as best actress contenders go, Tilda Swinton shines in The Eternal Daughter, where she re-teams with her director friend, Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir), to play both a mother and daughter; trans actress Trace Lysette (Transparent) has received praise for her portrayal of a woman reconnecting with her mum (Patricia Clarkson) in Andrea Pallaoro’s surprisingly effective Monica; and last year’s best actress winner, Penelope Cruz, is less likely for Emanuele Crialese’s The Immensity, about a 1970s woman struggling with her mental health as her 12-year-old son navigates his gender identity. The relationship between parents and their children has been a prominent theme at the festival.

The ultimate winners will be revealed in a ceremony on Saturday evening.

Harry Styles arrives for the screening of his film Don't Worry Darling in Venice. Picture: AFP

A radiant Julianne Moore, 61, as head of the competition jury, kicked off the proceedings last week, though she had also fronted the cameras the night before at a Variety party at the historic Hotel Danieli overlooking the Grand Canal. She joked about how on the jury, “we’re all going to wear the same thing and eat at the same time”, in an egalitarian manner as one imagines was the case when Blanchett was jury head two years ago.

Moore’s first visit to Venice was in 1986 when she was working on an American soap opera.

“If I had known then I would be the head of the jury at the Venice film festival, I would have fallen in the canal,” she quipped. “Honestly, it’s such an incredible honour.” Her fellow jurors include French director Audrey Diwan, winner of last year’s Golden Lion for Happening; and author and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, who adapted Akira Kurosawa’s original screenplay into English for Living, a film that posits Bill Nighy as an Oscar contender and that screens out of competition in Venice after world premiering in Sundance. It’s a rarity that a non-premiere film has a major platform at the festival.

Likewise, Master Gardener screened out of competition so will not be up for awards – even if Joel Edgerton is remarkable.

The Australian actor has pulled off a hat-trick this year. After wowing Cannes audiences with his portrayal as an undercover detective in The Stranger, he now gives one of his best performances in Master Gardener, directed by Paul Schrader. He plays the title role in the third movie in Schrader’s trilogy after First Reformed starring Ethan Hawke and The Card Counter starring Oscar Isaac, both of which premiered in Venice. But that’s not all. Schrader says the archetypal lonely man in the room character originated in Taxi Driver, which he wrote and where Robert De Niro played the role in the Martin Scorsese-directed classic.

“The generation I come from, we were looking at performances like De Niro’s,” says Edgerton, 48. “Paul is behind some of the movies that helped shape my interest in pursuing acting as a career.”

Timothee Chalamet attends the screening of his film Bones And All. Picture: Matrix

Edgerton, sporting spectacles and slicked-back hair, is Narvel Roth, a conscientious American horticulturist on the sprawling historic Gracewood Gardens estate of Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). When she needs to take care of her great-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), she entrusts Narvel to take her on as an apprentice and teach her all he knows.

As it happens, Narvel is in a witness protection program and we gradually learn what has transpired in his past. A major clue, delivered early on, is when Edgerton reveals his buff body, which is covered in tattoos including a large skull on his chest and a number of swastikas. Edgerton remains incredibly controlled throughout, even when the action is ramped up towards the end.

“It’s quite an interesting challenge for me,” Edgerton explains at the film’s press conference. “We often think films require a certain amount of characterisation or extending yourself far away from who you are and all that stuff. I believe as an actor the safest place you can be, hopefully, is if you go to work for a director you respect and trust and the rest should be relatively easy.

“You listen and you pay attention and you ask what you think is required of you and you try and do it. Paul and I had those conversations and the short version of it felt like there was a brief to not bring a bag of tricks, to bring a certain stillness and allow the chaos and the movement and the noise to be happening around the central character. It felt good at times and I felt very much out of my depth at times, but it started to really settle in.

“I’m glad for that experience, because I think every job stands to teach you something about what you’re capable of and what your comfort zones are.”