Emma Stone’s Poor Things and Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance are surprise hits in Venice
Hollywood acting royalty has stayed away – as has Roman Polanski – but the 80th Venice International Film Festival still has plenty of attractions.
Celebrating its 80th anniversary with few celebrities to adorn the red carpet, the Venice International Film Festival still has managed a few surprises. It was thought that two expensive biographical pictures – Michael Mann’s Ferrari and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro about Leonard Bernstein – would steal the thunder, but last Friday night one film emerged as a firm favourite: Poor Things directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Emma Stone, winner of the best actress Oscar for 2016’s La La Land, now seems an awards shoo-in for her remarkably brave nudity-laden star turn in Poor Things. The Frankenstein-esque sci-fi dramedy follows a young woman brought back to life by a brilliant and unorthodox scientist and she ultimately declares her independence by becoming a prostitute in Paris.
Luc Besson’s Dogman is another surprise hit. Venice audiences expecting the derring-do of the French director’s previous films, most famously The Fifth Element, may have been disappointed but all were deeply touched by the performance of Caleb Landry Jones who took out the Cannes best actor prize in 2021 for Justin Kurzel’s Australian film Nitram. In Dogman the American actor delivers an uncanny, controlled performance playing a young man who was abused as a child and who finds salvation through his love of dogs.
Besson, seated alongside his producer wife Virginie Besson-Silla at Dogman’s press conference, became emotional about the success of his film, which comes months after France’s appeals court dismissed rape accusations bought against him by Belgian-Dutch actress Sand Van Roy.
Woody Allen, 87, also is making a comeback with the widely adored Coup de Chance – his 50th film and his first in French – which harks back to the director’s 2005 film Match Point.
The festival also screened Roman Polanski’s The Palace, a zany comedy set on New Year’s Eve in 1999 in a luxury hotel, which went down like a lead balloon with the more highbrow critics. Others could see the fun and revelled in over-the-top performances by the likes of John Cleese, Mickey Rourke and Fanny Ardant. Given an extradition treaty between the US and Italy, Paris-based Polanski, 90, was unable to attend the festival. He also missed the 2019 festival at which An Officer and a Spy won the Venice grand jury prize.
Polanski fled the US in 1978 when facing imprisonment for engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
Because of the Hollywood actors’ strike there have been few stars on the Lido, although some independent films have been granted exemptions.
Actors Adam Driver and Patrick Dempsey, who in real life is also a race car driver, were in town to promote Ferrari, and the stars of Priscilla – newcomer Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley and Australia’s Jacob Elordi as Elvis – were on board in support of the Sofia Coppola-directed biopic.
“I was really lucky to be working with Sofia, who put my fears at ease immediately,” says Elordi, known for the hit HBO series Euphoria. “There was no real space to be daunted or afraid. It’s one of those things you hear from actors all the time that you want a challenge and this certainly was it.”
The film follows the Presleys’ relationship from their meeting in Germany when Priscilla was 14 until their separation. Based on her 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, the story isn’t always pretty, depicting Elvis as wildly controlling and often denying her sex. It’s much darker than anything we saw in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and there’s little of the King’s music to give it a lift.
Still, the film’s subject was in the press room among the audience and agreed to take a question. Presley says she was more of a listener in the relationship, comforting Elvis through “his fears, his hopes and the loss of his mother which he never ever got over … Even though I was 14 I was actually older in life and that was the attraction. People think it was sex, it was not at all. I never had sex with him (at that age); he was very kind, very soft, very loving … He was the love of my life.
“It was the lifestyle that was so difficult for me and I think any woman can relate to that.”
On Tuesday came Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which he co-wrote and co-produced with fellow Texan and Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell, who plays the leading role. (Powell was in Sydney recently filming the romantic comedy Anyone But You with Sydney Sweeney.) Hit Man is a comedy and based on a real-life story that has to be seen to be believed: Gary Johnson, a college professor, had posed in various guises as the most sought-after contract killer in Houston but was actually working for the cops to nab criminals. The film, which transposes the action to New Orleans, had critics screaming with approval at the end.
Linklater, 63, best known for Before Sunrise and its two sequels, says the film starts out telling Johnson’s story, then veers into fictional screwball comedy in the second half. “I work with actors who are smart and funny and that’s a good start,” he says.
“Glen would turn up and shock everyone with what he was doing. The film is attempting to hit a lot of notes – comedy, noir, thriller, psychological study – while examining most of all the concept of identity and how fixed our personalities may or may not be.”