‘Electrifying’: Joker’s wild at Venice

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is a highlight but the festival also unearthed other real gems.

‘Riveting performance’ ... Joaquin Phoenix in a scene from Joker. Picture: Warner Bros

Families, politics and the economy — these were the dominant themes of the 76th Venice Film Festival, which ended on the weekend.

Joaquin Phoenix brings the Joker to life. Picture: Warner Bros

The event that often forecasts Oscar winners seemed rather muted this year, and definitely more crowded, but though there might not have been any masterworks (such as last year’s Roma) there were plenty of excellent films on display.

The winner of the coveted Golden Lion was Todd Phillips’s Joker, which could be described as a comic book movie for people who don’t like comic book movies.

This electrifying backstory of one of Batman’s most formidable villains showcases a riveting performance from Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur, the pathetic would-be clown turned killer.

Comparisons with Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are inevitable thanks to Robert De Niro’s appearance as a smug TV talk show host.

The King, which screened out of competition, is David Michod’s best work since Animal Kingdom, a bold retelling of the relationship between Prince Hal, later King Henry V, and Sir John Falstaff.

Timothée Chalamet in The King.

Scripted by Michod and Joel Edgerton, who makes Falstaff a wholly endearing character, this dark epic junks the Shakespearean text and starts again with new insights into the relationships, betrayals and plots that led to the destructive Battle of Agincourt — a conflict stunningly well staged on location in Hungary.

Timothee Chalamet is magnificent as the King, and an almost unrecognisable Ben Mendelsohn gives a brief but moving portrait of the sickly Henry IV. These characters also appeared in Orson Welles’s magnificent Chimes at Midnight (1966) and it’s a tribute to all concerned that Mendelsohn and Edgerton enact so successfully the roles formerly played by John Gielgud and Welles himself. The King probably won’t get a cinema release, which is a shame, before it streams on Netflix.

Mendelsohn is also at his formidable best in first-time feature director Shannon Murphy’s adaptation of Rita Kalnejais’s play, Baby­teeth.

He is the father of the leading character, Milla — a superb Eliza Scanlen, a 16-year-old schoolgirl suffering from terminal cancer who falls in love with Moses (Toby Wallace, who deservedly won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for new acting talent), a 23-year-old dropout druggie covered in tatts.

At first it seems Moses is only after the drugs that Milla’s father can supply, but something wonderful happens during the course of the film. Babyteeth is not without flaws, but it handles a potentially mawkish story with originality and boldness. And the small cast, including Essie Davis as the mother, is flawless.

Eliza Scanlen stars in Babyteeth. Picture: Supplied

You might not think that a film devoted to meetings during which the economy of Europe is debated would be of much interest to anyone apart from economists, but veteran Costa-Gavras’s Adults in the Room, which also screened out of competition, is spellbinding.

The director of Z returns to his native Greece with this “human tragedy”, as he describes it, in which he follows newly appointed finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (Christos Loulis) as he attempts to renegotiate the loan Greece owes to the EU.

It sounds dull, but it’s as riveting as any thriller.

Meryl Streep in a scene from The Laundromat. Picture: Netflix

The world of international finance is also given unusual treatment in Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat — another Netflix film — in which Meryl Streep plays a widow whose efforts to claim the life insurance on her husband, who drowned when a ferry on which they were both travelling sank, are constantly thwarted because the insurance company has been taken over and is now based, it seems, in one of those offshore shell companies.

Discursive and often surprisingly funny, this expose of the machinations and manipulations that can destroy the lives of the unwary who place their trust in financial institutions is deftly handled by Soderbergh, with amus­ingly assertive performances from Gary Oldman, adopting a Werner Herzog accent, and Antonio Banderas, as a couple of very shady, very sly Panama-based lawyers.

Politics was also front and centre in the provocative documentary, The Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be, in which director Franco Maresco probes Palermo society 25 years after two of the city’s judges were assassinated by the mafia and discovers that the Cosa Nostra still wields a surprising amount of power.

But Roman Polanski’s sensationally good An Officer and a Spy (or J’accuse), the latest film version of the Dreyfus scandal that rocked France in the last decade of the 19th century, is a political drama of the very first order.

A scene from Roman Polanski's film An Officer and a Spy.

It begins with the “degrading” and humiliation of the Jewish Captain (Louis Garrel), convicted of high treason, and then follows the investigation of Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin, best known in Australia for his role in The Artist) as he attempts to prove Dreyfus is innocent and the victim of rampant anti-Semitism. Polanski’s intelligent, gripping approach makes this an edge-of-the-seat experience, even though the outcome is well known. Polanski was runner-up in the competition, winning the Grand Jury Prize.

A more recent story in which the establishment cracked down on a perceived outsider is told in Australian director Benedict Andrews’s Seberg, shown out of competition. Kristen Stewart gives a compelling performance as Jean Seberg, the young American actress who found fame in France (starring in one of the greatest New Wave films, Breathless) before returning to America to resume a Hollywood career.

Her involvement in the Black Power movement brings her to the FBI’s attention and it’s clear there won’t be a happy ending, especially when news of her behaviour is relayed to her husband Romain Gary (Yvan Attal).

A shattered marriage is also the focus of Noah Baumbach’s very fine Marriage Story, which openly announces its debt to Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.

The film begins with a brisk montage in which Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) describe what they like about each other. In fact they have already decided on a divorce, mainly because Charlie is a confirmed New Yorker — he directs plays there — and Nicole wants to resume her acting career in film and television, and that means LA.

Their small son is the pawn in all of this, and their high-priced lawyers (Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta) are laughing all the way to the bank. This is another Netflix film, and it’s an outstanding one.

The festival’s opener, La Verite (The Truth) is a French film directed by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda — and it’s not in the same league as his Japanese work (for example, the recent Shoplifters). Like Marriage Story, it centres on an actress, a veteran played by Catherine Deneuve in full chain-smoking, cynical overdrive. Juliette Binoche portrays her long-suffering daughter.

Finally, a word in favour of No 7 Cherry Lane, a voluptuous animated feature from Hong Kong in which director Yonfan explores — in lush, hot images — how the city used to be back in the 1960s and why his protagonist fell in love with French actress Simone Signoret. It’s a rich, mesmerising trip of a movie and it won the award for best screenplay.

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Venice Film Festival winners

Golden Lion for best film: Joker, by Todd Phillips

Grand Prix: An Officer and a Spy, by Roman Polanski

Silver Lion for best director: Roy Andersson, About Endlessness

Volpi Cup for best actress: Ariane Ascaride, Gloria Mundi

Volpi Cup for best actor: Luca Marinelli, Martin Eden

Best screenplay: Yonfan for No 7 Cherry Lane

Special jury prize: The Mafia is Not What it Used to Be. By Franco Maresco

Marcello Mastroianni award for young performer: Toby Wallace, Babyteeth