Aussies are everywhere at the Venice Film Festival

Venice this year boasts a distinctly Australian flavour with notables including actors Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Guy Pearce and director Justin Kurzel.

Nicole Kidman on the red carpet for Babygirl during the 81st Venice International Film Festival. Picture: Getty Images

The 81st Venice International Film Festival, which concludes this weekend after 11 days, has been a starry affair, starting with Tim Burton’s opening film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, in which a demon introduced to audiences in the original 1988 Beetlejuice is once again let loose to wreak havoc. The director plugged the family-friendly movie alongside his regular actor, Michael Keaton, not only his Beetlejuice but also his Batman. Winona Ryder likewise returns from the original film, only now her Lydia has a daughter, Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega, the star of hit Netflix series Wednesday, of which Burton directed four of eight episodes.

Monica Bellucci, Burton’s partner, is also a welcome addition to the cast as Delores, a demoness determined to claim the soul of Beetlejuice, her former husband. Bellucci and Burton met at the 2022 Lumiere Festival in Lyon France where she stepped in to interpret for him. This year in Venice they held hands on the red carpet and Bellucci said she was “honoured to enter Tim’s world”.

Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux has been a festival highlight, even if some critics cavil, with Variety writing: “It doesn’t let Joker be Joker enough.” In any case it is bound to be an audience favourite. From the first moment we see Joaquin Phoenix emaciated with a crooked shoulder, we empathise with his Joker/Arthur Fleck character, even though he is a murderer.

On Wednesday in Venice the media-shy star looked healthy and happy, and was surprisingly amenable. He said he worked with a doctor on a specific diet to achieve the weight loss for the original Joker, for which he won the best actor Oscar in 2020. (The film also won Venice’s Golden Lion for best picture in 2019.) “This time, it felt a bit more complicated just because there was so much dance rehearsal that we were doing, which I didn’t have last time,” Phoenix said. “So it felt a bit more difficult, but it is safe. I’m now 49, I probably shouldn’t do this again. This is probably it for me.”

Fans screamed as he arrived for the premiere with co-star Lady Gaga, who plays Lee, the character who becomes Harley Quinn. Gaga said that when she saw the original Joker film she thought it was unique, which was why she wanted to make the new movie. Phoenix said Arthur’s “quest for love and that kind of safety that he yearns for and has yearned for is a big propellant on the story”.

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix at the Joker: Folie A Deux photocall in Venice. Picture: Getty Images.

Certainly Phoenix’s on-screen chemistry with Gaga is palpable, especially when they sing. “I wouldn’t necessarily say this is a musical,” Gaga said. “The way music is used is to give the ­characters a way to express what they need to say because speaking is not enough.”

The festival was memorable for Australian filmmaker Peter Weir winning the prestigious lifetime achievement Golden Lion award, but Australians also featured in other films, notably in two of the strong competition films, Babygirl and The Order. In Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl Nicole Kidman was unafraid to embrace explicit nudity, playing a CEO who is unsatisfied by her husband (the usually sexy Spaniard Antonio Banderas), and has a sado-masochistic affair with her young intern (Harris Dickinson from Triangle of Sadness). Kidman, who, at the film’s press conference admitted she was nervous – “I hope my hands aren’t shaking” – said the film is about female desire and a woman in an existential crisis.

“This film is obviously, yes, it’s about sex. It’s about desire. It’s about your inner thoughts. It’s about secrets. It’s about marriage. It’s about truth, power and consent … I hope it’s a very liberating story.”

Sophie Wilde, star of the international hit Talk to Me and a recent Logie winner for Boy Swallows Universe, has a supporting role as a young woman who discovers Kidman’s affair. “She comes along and shakes the whole thing up,” Kidman noted.

“I feel like I’ve grown up with Nicole and Moulin Rouge is one of my favourite films,” Wilde admitted. “It was an honour to work with someone I admire so much.”

Kidman added: “We had a great time because we could talk about everything – Sophie went to NIDA (the National Institute of Dramatic Art) and we talked about growing up in Australia and what that means. It’s beautiful to see these young Australians coming up and taking a big bite out of the world that they deserve.”

Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in Babygirl.

The Order marks the first American film by Australian director Justin Kurzel, who with Nitram and Snowtown proved he knows his way around a crime drama. His new film follows a white supremacist group, The Order, which was active in the US in the 1980s and was headed by the charismatic Bob Matthews (played by Nicholas Hoult, from Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang). Jude Law, who also produced the film, plays a world-weary FBI agent on the group’s tail. The British heart-throb has a rougher appearance than usual and is a sure contender for the best actor award, with Variety decreeing “Jude Law is officially back” following a seven-minute standing ovation at the premiere.

Kurzel said he cast actors he wanted to work with, even if his leads were both Brits playing Americans. Australia’s Odessa Young plays Matthews’ mistress. He noted the film has a current resonance as it’s “about an ideology that’s incredibly dangerous and how it can quickly take seed. I think that’s a timeless thing, not only in America, but in Australia too”.

Other Australians prominent at the festival are Guy Pearce and Cate Blanchett. Pearce plays a wealthy client of Adrien Brody’s emigrant Jewish architect in Brady Corbet’s post-World War II epic, The Brutalist, which is favoured for an award. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman praised Pearce’s performance.

“Pearce is often a riveting character actor, but it’s been a long time since he popped in a role the way he does here. In thick wavy hair and a moustache, speaking with a booming stentorian bluster that’s plummy and irresistible, he’s like Clark Gable playing Charles Foster Kane.”

Blanchett was at the festival for Alfonso Cuaron’s series Disclaimer, though both said very little in their press conference, hoping to minimise plot spoilers given its heavy reliance on dramatic twists. Leila George, who plays a younger, raunchy version of Blanchett’s character, was only sighted on the red carpet.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt promote Wolfs at Venice, with Clooney’s wife Amal, centre.

Kodi Smit-McPhee has a smaller role as Blanchett’s drug-addicted son and also appears in Maria, starring Angelina Jolie as opera singer Maria Callas. Festival director Alberto Barbera admitted he kept the screenings of Maria and Wolfs, starring Jolie’s ex, Brad Pitt, days apart so there would be no chance of the pair running into each other. Wolfs, also starring Pitt’s buddy George Clooney, is the story of two crime scene cleaners who turn up for the same gig. It is fun, but will not be given a cinema release, and instead will stream on Apple TV+. In some quarters Jolie is being touted for an Oscar nomination for Maria, set in the final week of the soprano’s life in 1997 in Paris, but doesn’t quite capture Callas’s joie de vivre.

Daniel Craig has also been at Venice, having teamed with Luca Guadagnino (Challengers) for Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s short novel about an American expat who becomes infatuated with a young man (Drew Starkey) in 1940s Mexico City.

Craig described the story as emotional, about “love, loss, loneliness and yearning. If I was writing myself a part and trying to tick off the things that I wanted to do, this would fulfil all of them”.

While not everyone will go for this erotic nudity-laden yarn (no full frontal for Craig, though other actors reveal all), critics have given the film high praise. Deadline noted it “nails the sardonic wit” of Burroughs, The Guardian said “Craig is needy, horny and mesmeric”, while Indiewire opines that the film “will blow your mind and cut your heart open”.

The Venice Film Festival’s competition awards, including the Golden Lion for best film, will be presented at a ceremony on Saturday night Venice time by a jury headed by Isabelle Huppert.