Love in all its forms, from messy to romantic, is at the core of Sorrentino’s profound film ‘La Grazia’, his most awardable since ‘La Grande Bellezza’, and at the Opening Ceremony of this year’s La Biennale, it proved an emotional affair.
As I settled down into my extraordinary seat in the second row of the Sala Grande — all thanks to the wonderful angel in the press office (you know who you are) — I couldn’t help but feel I was witnessing history in the making. Granted, this is not a milestone edition of La Biennale, which celebrated its 80th edition two years ago, or even that time that we, the privileged invited few, had to wait cordoned off inside the lobby of the theater because President Napolitano was in attendance on opening night. And security had to do their thing. Yet what we were about to witness this time around was historical, in a cinematic way, and all the same.
Mohammad Rasoulof and Fernanda Torres on the same Competition jury, posing on the red carpet with jury president Alexander Payne, felt historic enough, considering not too long ago, three years ago in fact, the festival publicly protested the Iranian filmmaker’s detention in Iran. Brazilian actress Torres, of course, won that gilded award statuette, which shall remain nameless henceforth on this site, last year and Payne is one of those great American men (exports, can I say that?) who makes yours truly still proud to hold that once coveted dark blue covered passport.
Francis Ford Coppola and Werner Herzog on the opening red carpet, photo by © Jacopo Salvi, ASAC
Paolo Sorrentino is always ahead of our times and there was something very John Wayne about him too, while he walked around the red carpet holding court, posing for photographers and signing autographs for his young fans.
More history happened on the stage of the Sala Grande, which is large, as the name says, but also intimate. As cinematic legend Francis Ford Coppola handed the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to his friend and fellow icon German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in doing so he declared “we must celebrate that someone like him actually exists!” Adding that Herzog has made films that Coppola, and we the audience, had never seen before, constantly reinventing the genre and “inventing categories that don’t yet exist.” He concluded about his friend, who admitted he wrote Fitzcarraldo while staying at Coppola’s house in San Francisco, “if Werner has limits, I don’t know what they are!”
Keeping the ceremony in check throughout the night was actress and comedian Emanuela Fanelli, who starred in some popular Italian titles like There’s Still Tomorrow, Paola Cortellesi’s 2023 film that famously surpassed Barbie — yes, Barbie! — at the Italian box office that year. Fanelli will be conducting the closing ceremony as well, and had a mixture of funny and touching anecdotes to say about cinema and La Biennale.
Emanuela Fanelli on the opening ceremony red carpet, photo by © Jacopo Salvi for AFAC
During the next fortnight, Fanelli pointed out “we’ll be watching too many films, which we won’t understand but will be ashamed to admit! So we will emphasize the great camera work” and technical aspects, “to hide our ignorance,” the actress told the audience. It reminded it of a button we got in Cannes one year, when we were still getting freebies as members of the press, that said “I didn’t understand anything but I liked the movie.” Oh, as a brief aside, we still get a great tote bag here in Venice, as always courtesy of Milanese bag manufacturer Tucano, this year in a bright orange-red cloth with beige handles. I’m thankful it matches the new lipstick I brought, which I wore to the opening night.
Alright, back to business. I promise.
Fanelli also took us down memory lane, by talking about the time she went to the movies with her dad, to watch Disney’s 1989 The Little Mermaid. Still a child at the time, the 39 year old actress admitted she cried in the cinema and was frightened of Ursula, the corpulent, villainous Cecaelian sea witch. “My dad told me ‘doesn’t she look like Zio Mimmo?’ which took my fear away,” Fanelli said, continuing that cinema does that to us, it gives us a strategy, “to deal with fear by laughing, cinema is a school for that.” She also concluded that we, as human beings “are so beautiful at the movies, if only we could take that part of ourselves outside of the movies and empathize like we do there, it would be less difficult to be in this world.” Fanelli is a signatory on the V4P — Venice 4 Palestine open letter which calls for the Venice Film Festival to acknowledge what is going on in Gaza and help rally voices to stop the madness. The madness of prime minister Netanyahu that is.
"Stop the clocks, turn off the stars.” The petition starts, “the burden is too much to carry on living as before. For almost two years now, images of unmistakable clarity have been reaching us from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Incredulous and helpless, we keep witnessing the torment of a genocide carried out live by the State of Israel in Palestine. No one will ever be able to say: "I couldn't know, I couldn't imagine, I couldn't believe.We have seen it all. We keep seeing it all.” It calls for La Biennale to be more proactive, but the problem is that governments need to intervene and stop this homicidal maniac. They needed to do it in the fall of 2023, when it all started. And now, it may all be too late.
Fact is, journalists in the audience were all waiting for Fanelli to say something political from the stage, which she did not. Peace deals and war strategies should be discussed in legal chambers, on diplomatic tables, not on red carpets. And while the initiative has, of course, attracted well-meaning celebrities, and even gotten some high profile EP’s for one Tunisian filmmaker who has made a film about a Palestinian martyr, it will end up fizzling out after Venice.
Next, it was time for Paolo Sorrentino’s stunning La Grazia, the film a colleague called “La Grande Bellezza without the bellezza part,” meaning all the austerity needed for a film about our contemporary world. It’s a film which I found to be the most grownup, wonderfully profound work by the Neapolitan Maestro so far — and I’m a huge fan already — which was followed by nearly ten minutes of standing ovation at the end. Well deserved for a film that takes us through the different aspects of love and brings us out at the other end, holding our breath.
A review is here.
Images courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia, used with permission.