Reviews

Nico, 1988, which opened the  2017 Venice Horizons section and also played in Toronto, is not the first documentary about Christa Paffgen, better known as Nico, the superstar of Andy Warhol’s famous Factory and later lead singer of The Velvet Underground. In 1995, another female director, Susanne Ofteringer, chronicled in Nico Icon the self-destructive lifestyle of the German singer, actress, and model, but it was a too broad documentary that tried to encompass a whole life in the frame of one hour.

Israeli director Samuel Maoz, who won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for his stunning war film, Lebanon, likes to take his time between movies. But it’s almost tempting to say that it was worth waiting as Foxtrot is just as inventive and bold as Lebanon, albeit in different ways, and thematically even more encompassing than the previous winning feature.

Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, who made the powerful film The Attack, which not many people beyond the festival circuit saw, continues to impress with The Insult, a large-scale drama that should appeal to bigger audiences. The new film, which is well shot and well acted, is about a seemingly trivial street incident – a slur – between two working class men, which first escalates into a vocal verbal dispute, then into a physical brawl, and finally into an emotionally and politically charged courtroom drama about broader moral and ethical issues.

What begins as an old-fashioned family melodrama turns into a more complex existential meditation on the way we live now in Robert Guédiguian’s La Villa  (The House by the Sea). Unlike most Hollywood family sagas, the story doesn’t center on the inevitable conflicts between parents and children – the classic generation rift – but on three late middle-aged siblings, when they reunite at the place where they grew up.

Intense, funny, tragic and cathartic are the words that may best describe Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a story of desperation, revenge, and determination featuring a fierce Frances McDormand as a divorced Missouri mother who pursues justice for her murdered daughter with the steely resolve of Rosie the Riveter (if, that is, she was also Clint Eastwood’s daughter). A case of augmented dramatic reality, which skirts the edges of flat-out comedy, social critique, the film certainly minces no words in putting forth its rollicking narrative which somehow perfectly fits the times.

Guillermo del Toro’s lifelong fascination with monsters and dark fable takes a liquid form in The Shape of Water, an otherworldly love story which is at its core a lyrical, poetic and poignant celebration of artists, idealists, and dreamers. And ultimately, as the director told an HFPA journalist just after receiving a minutes-long standing ovation at the Palazzo del Cinema, about love conquering fear.

“After Sideways I had hoped this would be my next movie” says multi Golden Globe nominated and winner Alexander Payne – visibly elated to be in Venice and exhibiting his flawless accents in the Italian and Spanish words he interspersed liberally in the talk he had with HFPA journalists in the Excelsior hotel’s beautiful Sala Stucchi. As Hollywood would have it that was not to be, as development purgatory (and the shooting of The Descendants and Nebraska) pushed back the completion of Downsizing for more than ten years.

Paul Schrader’s singular path to becoming one of American cinema’s enduring original voices was unusual to say the least. The writer or co-writer of films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull (both screenplays were nominated for Golden Globes) and the Last Temptation of Christ and director of American Gigolo, Cat People and Auto Focus, he had never seen a film before the age of seventeen, being more occupied by a strict Calvinist upbringing and college studies with a minor in theology.

A highlight of the Directors Fortnight, the bolder and more innovative sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival, The Florida Project is Sean Baker’s eagerly-awaited follow up to Tangerine, the ultra-modest feature that put him on the international cinema map. Centering on a precocious girl (Brooklynn Prince), during one eventful summer, his fifth feature boasts Baker’s biggest budget to date, and an ensemble cast that includes a discovery of a six-year-old-girl, some unprofessional actors, and a vet performer like Willem Dafoe.

Gallic writer-director Robin Campillo is a major talent to watch. In is feature directing debut, 120 Beats Per Minute which world premiered in Competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Fest, he revisits with passion and compassion his past as a member of the AIDS activist organization ACT UP in 1990s Paris.