After a bombastic, richly diverse start with a fierce Angelina Jolie as ailing Maria Callas in Maria, the latest of Pablo Larrain’s darkly sentimental flicks about famous women, an uncompromising Nicole Kidman in Halina Reijn’s erotic dramedy Babygirl, and an unhinged Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s nostalgia-driven Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the second part of the Venice Film Festival continued with yet more risque, irreverent releases.
In the vein of socially relevant topics such as that of militaristic oppression in Walter Salles’ excellent I’m Still Here, or more metaphysical explorations of love and intimacy as in Pedro Almodóvar’s Golden Lion-winning The Room Next Door, below are some more films that got the island of Lido talking.
Queer, Director: Luca Guadagnino
(US release date through A24, “late 2024”)
If I told you there was a film coming out where the main plot revolves around an inexplicably rich middle-aged American junkie just fucking about in Mexico City, then meeting and becoming obsessed with a much younger, “enigmatic” man sporting a straight outta NYU Lit department aesthetic, finally inviting him to embark on a paid adventure to go tripping on ayahuasca in Latin America, you’d be right to shut me down with a curt “but VICE no longer exists”. As much as it sounds like creative bagatelle, Luca Guadagnino’s latest, Queer, based on the eponymous novella by William S. Burroughs, does indeed develop along these lines. It is also, unsurprisingly, one of the best films of the year so far.
One of (Italy’s) finest working directors and a long-time Venice darling, Guadagnino, makes Queer his second triumph this season. Having postponed the planned launch for Challengers at last year’s Biennale due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, this year, the go-to auteur for all things love and desire comes back to his homeland with yet another heartbreaking tale of the many failures of enamorment. Mostly faithfully adapted by the Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes with some extra motifs from Burroughs’ biography, Queer succeeds both in being “Burroughsian” (a term Guadagnino used to describe it) and unmistakably helmed by Guadagnino – hyper-stylized, dream-like, and brimming with emotion.
The film starts in medias res, or should we say in limbo, a flamboyant purgatory, as the deranged, horny, melodramatic “Lee” (a stupefying Daniel Craig), a wealthy and idle American, passes his time around a richly hallucinatory Mexico City in the 1950s. The neons are blinding, the nosheries buzzing, and the alleys erupt in a frenzy within slick montages featuring loudly anachronistic tunes by Nirvana, Prince, and New Order.
Lee is openly gay and even more openly alcoholic; his days of dilly-dallying with a fellow homosexual and bar owner Joe (a truly hilarious Jason Schwartzman) are deliciously gossipy, but also painfully static. Until Allerton (a star-launching performance by Drew Starkey) shows up, that is. Out of the blue, this calm and reticent young man will walk into Mexico City’s gin joints in high-waist khakis and thin-rim glasses, dazzling Lee with his inscrutable smile.
In a blink of an eye, Lee will go for broke to win Allerton over. Immoderate in love as he is in liquor and narcotics, he will flirt, then stalk, then grovel, but will stop at nothing just to be near Allerton. Meanwhile, the cryptic young man will keep his poker face on (“You are not queer, are you?”, Lee will ask pleadingly) throughout his liaison with an increasingly erratic Lee, whose imitation of life will quickly start to fall apart under the weight of real emotions and doubts.
It all decidedly screams Guadagnino’s haute aesthetics, but the discomfort of “Burroughsian” stream-of-consciousness confabulations permeates every frame. The director explained that Queer was deliberately not shot on location but in Rome’s Cinecittà studios, to ensure removal from political and other material histories. This way, what’s on display is “a” world, a private reverie of a largely unreliable narrator. What’s universal about the story is its fidelity to raw feelings and the suffering this removal from the real world causes.
Daniel Craig is known to disappear inside his versatile roles, but he transcends the domain of mere performance as the lost and delusional Lee. Standoffish and pathetic as his character may be, he is also desperately human in his relentless, almost comical pursuit of certainty and (self)-acceptance. Opposite him, Allerton, a non-entity, practically a phantasm, fills the many voids in Lee’s life a bit too conveniently. One suspects from the outset that this dalliance might prove transformative for Lee but likely not in the ways he longed for.
Much of Queer’s world’s potent symbolism comes from 20th-century painters; indoor scenes are staggeringly Hopper-esque, otherwise the many hallucinations draw heavily on René Magritte and, in an appropriate nod to the Mexican culture, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. What would otherwise end up a misbegotten sensory overload, in Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s capable hands everything makes sense.
As stylized as Queer undoubtedly is, its greatest quality is the honesty with which it portrays the many plights of humanity, from a general sense of purposelessness to aging, addiction, accepting one’s own queerness, and especially the longing for love. Flawlessly, heartbreakingly acted and profound, this is a feature that warrants repeat viewings. Queer will likely become a cult classic, well worth revisiting as one’s own life advances and mutates.
Joker: Folie à Deux, Director: Todd Phillips
(US release date 3 October)
It’s a musical, all right. It’s also very meta.
After achieving enormous success, including $1 bn at the box office, the Golden Lion in Venice, and the first Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix, Todd Phillips (The Hangover, Road Trip) knew he would get carte blanche to do whatever he pleased with the inevitable sequel to 2019’s intriguing if superficial Joker. For better and for worse, this is exactly what he did with Joker: Folie à Deux, a bold and smart (smarter than the original, actually), if not very hot take on how collective fantasies and simplistic appeal of personas destroy both individuals and society (not to mention critical thinking).
Whether you will like the film depends heavily on how invested you are in the idea of donning a costume to rage against the machine – or how ready you are to accept the sweeping nihilism that trails every attempt at pushback by the humiliated and forgotten everyman. But before we get to these good parts, Joker: Folie à Deux will take the bulk of its 138-minute runtime indulging in pointless musical reveries, misplacing a spectacular Lady Gaga, and generally stalling the already paper-thin plot by rehashing the first film in a lifeless, drawn-out trial.
Joaquin Phoenix, in a superbly grisly Machinist turn, reprises his role as Arthur Fleck, the most unfortunate man alive and the accidental, ambivalent “Joker” the public fell in love with after he murdered four abusive people (his mother is the unrevealed fifth). The spark that ignited the flame (quite literally, on the streets) and the rage of the masses was Joker’s killing of talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert de Niro) on live television. What started as an homage to Scorcese morphs into a bizarre combo of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and something along the lines of Murder in the First (a bleak 1995 Kevin Bacon and Gary Oldman prison drama) in the sequel, which picks up some five years later.
Fleck, an emaciated, kyphotic shadow of a man, keeps rotting under systemic humiliation, this time in jail. The ever-dependable Brendan Gleeson compels as a prison guard invested in making Fleck’s life little more than misery porn, and Fleck himself has lost all hope for a bearable life while his attorney (an underutilized Catherine Keener) tries to secure an insanity plea to transfer him to a more “humane” institution.
Phoenix is among the exceptionally rare actors who can embody frighteningly psychotic and relatably mundane to equally intense emotional effect and it’s genuinely disconcerting to watch him shrivel in apathy as Fleck, an ordinary, unassuming man not even ignored, but constantly hounded by the neoliberal establishment. Just as we start to wonder how Fleck’s story could ever take off the ground, a rocketship appears in the fully commanding form of Lady Gaga. Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, an inmate at the psychiatric ward and a fiendishly animated singer (go figure), also happens to be a Joker super fangirl, swearing she watched a documentary on him “like, a hundred times” and pledging allegiance to his unwitting crusade of vengeance for the downtrodden.
Fleck falls in love instantly, and Folie à Deux plunges into a typical theatrical musical setup, as Lee and Fleck escape into fantasies of… well, different things. While he tenderly revisits soulful and jazzy classics such as “For Once in My Life” and “When You’re Smiling“, she is more concerned with “building a mountain” and “getting happy”, driving her ambition home with “That’s Entertainment”. As the trial approaches, all of a sudden everything is at stake. The rest is better not spoiled.
However painful a watch for its portrayal of reality TV culture and everyday denigration of the common folk, the first Joker was also quite problematic for its lack of moral focus, ending up as a manifesto not for the abused poor, but for middle-class incels (a subset of whom, and I’m not joking, refers to themselves as “clowncels“). Phillips mostly acknowledges the trap he set up for himself in Joker: Folie à Deux, deploying Gaga as a proxy for the folk fame monsters and ensuring the bloodthirsty fantasists understand that Arthur Fleck couldn’t be further from an icon or a “symbol of rebellion”. Neither a simple criminal nor an innocent, the wretched Fleck, now driven by love, strives to gain some agency by forging a meaningful relationship for the first time in his life. Again, no spoilers, but surprises abound.
It’s frustrating that so much of what could have been an innovative, multifaceted film about the horrors both anonymity and celebrity endure in this postmodern world gets eaten up by endless yet pointless singing, a stagnant plot, and plenty of generic dialogue. Phoenix and Gaga do their impressive best with what they’re given, but the emotional impact of Folie à Deux’s ideas is blunted by listless direction and needless revisiting of the first film. Fans will hopefully appreciate Phillips’ brave denouement and the points he makes about the absurdity of fighting in the realm of the symbolic, but it’s sadly unlikely the average viewer will leave the cinema thinking little more than “that’s entertainment”.
2073, Director: Asif Kapadia
(US release in October)
Famous British documentarist Asif Kapadia surely took a hefty bite with 2073. In this film he crams corporatism, surveillance, climate change, fascism, and a general erosion of what we in 2024 call “democracy” in a mere 82 minutes. This dystopian docudrama stars Samantha Morton as a mute survivor of an unnamed cataclysm struggling through reveries of the past.
Inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 science fiction featurette La Jetée, 2073 is an impassioned narrated montage of the apocalypse that awaits civilization lest we acknowledge our many political sins. “Chairwoman” Ivanka Trump celebrates her 30th anniversary in power in the dissolved Americas, where the remaining populace is overseen by drones and kept in check by militant troops. As we swerve between documentary state-of-the-world footage and fictionalized narration by Morton (who recalls her life on Earth prior to humans “blowing it” in somber voiceovers), 2073, didactic and on the nose as it is, will invite us to consider just how close we are to a plausible catastrophe unfolding in similar fashion.
The combination of documentary and fictionalized materials doesn’t always come together seamlessly, but it adds dynamism and drive to the narrative. Morton’s survivor, who never really explains the 2034 cataclysmic “Event,” commandingly invites us into their destitute, shattered world, which takes no prisoners and leaves little room for hope.
While a capable, imaginative filmmaker with his heart in the right place, Kapadia fails to connect many of the horrors we are currently subjected to in a cohesive whole. Trump is obviously used as a half-assed joke for authoritarianism, but there is no mention of the ruling Democratic party being a side of the same neoliberal, corporatist, infinite “war on terror” profit-bringing coin. Some media have praised (?!) the film for “not being strident”, while it ought to have been far more graphic in “memory” of how the global northwest went from relative stability to libertarian precarity and how (and why) the “developing countries” lost their many battles for independence and got swept under the tide of an unrelenting, global free market.
Lest we forget, all of the above are directly connected, and if 2073 refuses to offer solutions or imagine alternatives, then it could have at least articulated the problem better. We are left with an innovative, intriguing story that shocks and scares but still works better as a paradigmatic dystopia than a political parable.