Nobody expected this winner
US director Laura Poitras accepts the Golden Lion for Best Picture for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Those: dpa / Domenico Stinellis
The Golden Lion has been awarded – to a surprise winner. The evening was disappointing for streaming giant Netflix – despite several complex hopefuls. Competitor Amazon, on the other hand, cleared with only one candidate.
Et was yet another disappointing awards night for Netflix. The Venice Film Biennale, the festival that opens its doors widest to the streamer, completely ignored the Netflix productions in the competition: nothing for the opening film “White Noise”, nothing for “Bardo”, the big film by Mexican star director Alejandro González Iñárritu, nothing for the much-heralded Monroe biography “Blonde”, nothing for Romain Gavras’ French civil war drama “Athena”.
Worse, streaming rival Amazon’s only competitive production took home two awards, romantic cannibal road movie Bones and All. Luca Guadagnino won the director’s award and Taylor Russell best young actress, both rightly so.
Unexpectedly, the Golden Lion went to “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, a mixture of artist portrait and activism film (if there is such a term). Laura Poitras – she had already made films about Edward Snowden (“Citizenfour”) and Julian Assange (“Risk”), combines a career description of the photographer Nan Goldin with the documentation of her fight against the pharmaceutical family Sackler, whose drug oxycodone is worth billions blamed for the opioid crisis in the United States.
Like Bones and all, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer went home with two awards. Like her namesake Mati Diop (Grand Prix for “Atlantics” in Cannes), Diop comes from the extensive Senegalese Diop family, both Mati and Alice were born and educated in France. “Saint Omer” is about a real life case, of infanticide when the mother abandoned her baby on a beach when the tide came in. “Saint Omer” is told from the perspective of a writer who is present at the trial. Diop’s film also garnered the Best First Feature Award.
The jury’s special prize went to “No Bears”, the latest film by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has been under the shadow of a six-year prison sentence for “riots” for twelve years and has since made five films despite being banned from working. The main character – played by Panahi herself – travels to a lonely border village to direct the on-screen shooting of a film that is being shot on the other side of the border in Turkey. “No Bears” was finished when Panahi was arrested in July to begin his long-served incarceration.
“Love Life” by Kōji Fukada gets the cold shoulder – wrongly
Also departing Venice with two awards is The Banshees of Inisherin, the new film from Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri director Martin McDonagh. “Banshees” is, like “Billboards”, a black comedy: It’s about two friends on a small Irish island, one of whom abruptly ends the friendship for reasons that are not entirely transparent. Both Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell are great, but the actor’s award went only to Farrell (and best screenplay to McDonagh).
Cate Blanchett, who plays the (fictitious) first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (which was doubled by the Dresdeners) in “Tár”, was awarded Best Female Lead; Rarely has an actress been so good in such a failed film.
Rarely has a jury turned the cold shoulder on a highly prized film like that of Julianne Moore’s Japanese drama “Love Life” by Kōji Fukada. A relationship drama triangle, it tells with great gentleness and high emotional impact the devastating aftermath for people who are dumped by their loved one in favor of another.