Pedro Almodóvar Wins the Golden Lion

A war reporter (Tilda Swinton) is dying of cancer, and she asks a friend (Julianne Moore) to be with her while she prepares to take her impending death into her own hands. Like many, Time’s Stephanie Zacharek finds that “at first the movie’s tone feels a little strange, untethered to any easily identifiable genre . . . And yet, by the end, something almost mystical has happened: the movie’s final moments usher in a kind of twilight, a state of grace that you don’t see coming.” The Room Next Door was one of three films premiering in Venice that we took a first look at last week, and the other two have won major awards as well.

Brady Corbet won the Silver Lion for Best Director for The Brutalist, the story of an immigrant architect (Adrien Brody) given a shot in America at realizing his grandest vision. Rolling Stone’s David Fear notes that Corbet “labored with love for seven years on this mutant hybrid of The Fountainhead, The Conformist, and The Godfather, and it should be met with an equal amount of awe and admiration.” A24 has just picked up U.S. rights, and like The Room Next Door, The Brutalist is screening in Toronto and will soon head to New York.

The hearts of many, including Huppert, went out to Nicole Kidman when director Halina Reijn announced that she would be unable to accept her Volpi Cup for Best Actress in person. She’d raced home earlier that morning, the moment she learned that her mother had died. Kidman’s Romy in Reijn’s Babygirl is a high-flying CEO coming to terms with her repressed desires. “With cheeky intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) daring Romy to embark on BDSM adventures,” writes Ela Bittencourt in her best-of-Venice roundup for frieze, “Kidman plays out kink scenes with a disarming mixture of vulnerability, hilarity, and edginess.”

The two other acting awards went to performers in films directed by siblings and set in the same northeastern region of France. Vincent Lindon, the winner of the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, plays a widower at a loss as his eldest son falls in with right-wing agitators in Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s The Quiet Son. “With his distinctive sad and weary facial features, which make him a live-action Droopy and the living emblem of socially conscious French cinema,” writes Max Borg at the Film Verdict, Lindon is “perfectly cast as Pierre, a part he wears as though it were an extension of the roles he played in Stéphane Brizé’s triptych about workers’ rights.”

The Marcello Mastroianni Award presented to young actors went to Paul Kircher, who plays an aimless teen in a desolate town in Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma’s And Their Children After Them. “Kircher was a revelation in Thomas Cailley’s neurodivergent-coded creature feature The Animal Kingdom, holding his own opposite veteran actor Romain Duris,” writes Sophie Monks Kaufman at IndieWire. “He proves that this breakout performance was no fluke with an introverted awkwardness that is both hard to watch and impossible to look away from.”

The Grand Jury Prize, a Silver Lion essentially standing in for second place, went to Vermiglio. Maura Delpero’s fourth feature “unfolds from tiny tactile details of furnishings and fabrics and the hide of a dairy cow into a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety. “Far away, the Second World War is ending—an earthshaking event felt here only in abstract ways, because there’s the real labor of community and family to be getting on with, to say nothing of the private work of finding your own path to tread beneath those towering peaks . . . The remarkable, raw-boned, and ravishing Vermiglio takes place in the past but operates like a future family secret playing out in the present tense.”

Dea Kulumbegashvili won a Special Jury Prize for April, starring Ia Sukhitashvili as an obstetrician providing all-but-illegal abortions in eastern Georgia. “An uncompromising, intensely felt panorama of female identities, agencies, and desires under attack—by the patriarchy, certainly, but sometimes by the intangible cruelties of nature itself—April manages to be both a work of controlled formal rigor and unleashed, often overwhelming human feeling,” writes Guy Lodge for Variety. “As such, it makes good on the colossal promise of Kulumbegashvili’s 2020 debut Beginning, another startling study of womanhood persecuted and violated in Georgia’s rural heartland, while pushing her filmmaking into greater extremes of surrealism and unblinking real-world observation.”

Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega won the award for Best Screenplay for I’m Still Here, the first feature Walter Salles has directed since On the Road (2012) and the first he’s made in his native Brazil since Linha de Passe (2008). “Many powerful films have been made about the twenty-one years of military dictatorship in Brazil, from 1964 through 1985,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “It’s not often, however, that the spirit of protest against the horrors of junta rule is viewed through such an intimate lens as I’m Still Here. That aspect is deepened by evidence throughout the film of Salles’s personal investment in the true story of the Paiva family after patriarch Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman, was taken from his Rio de Janeiro house in 1971, ostensibly to give a deposition, and never seen or heard from again.”

In Venice, the Orizzonti program runs parallel to the main competition in much the same way that Un Certain Regard does in Cannes. Debra Granik’s jury presented this year’s Orizzonti Award for Best Film to The New Year That Never Came. “With his accomplished feature debut,” writes Wendy Ide for Screen, “Bogdan Mureşanu views a pivotal moment in Romanian history—the fall of the Ceaușescu regime—through the eyes and the interconnected stories of six ordinary people. It’s a confident and, at times, savagely funny work which, while a little overlong, builds to a blisteringly powerful conclusion.”

The standout film in the program, though, was clearly Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, the winner of the awards for Best Director and Best Actress (Kathleen Chalfant) and—from a separate jury chaired by Gianni Canova—the Lion of the Future, the award for the best first feature premiering in any program in Venice. Chalfant, who plays Ruth, a woman in her eighties adjusting to her recent move to an assisted living facility, is “one of those acclaimed theater actors who has never found the same showcase for her talents onscreen,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore, “and the delicacy of what she does in this role is astounding, transmitting Ruth’s tumultuous state of mind without words and making us aware of the whirring of her brain as she, say, puts a slice of toast in the dish rack and then looks at it for a while, sensing that something isn’t right but unable to figure out what.” Familiar Touch “can be sad, without question, but it’s also salty and boundlessly tender—a decisive statement that Ruth’s life is not over, even if she can no longer keep living it the way she did before.”

As Luigi, a twenty-year-old from the broken family at the broken heart of Francesco Costabile’s Familia, Francesco Gheghi, the winner of the Best Actor award, “captures the intensity and vulnerability required to portray a young man aware of his capacity for violence,” writes Jared Abbott, “not just in the outside world with his fascist friends, but also against women.” Palestinian writer, director, and editor Scandar Copti won the award for Best Screenplay for Happy Holidays, “which places an Arab-speaking Israeli family at the hub of a wheel of intersecting stories,” notes Lee Marshall in Screen. The film is “relentless” as it “lays bare a society in which surveillance, suspicion, and denunciation are embedded on the personal level.”

Modeled after the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, the Giornate degli Autori was founded twenty years ago and is run by ANAC and 100autori, associations of Italian directors and writers. The jury led by Joanna Hogg gave the GdA Directors’ Award to Marianna Brennand for her first feature, Manas, the story of a young woman confronting an oppressive patriarchy on the island of Marajó in the Amazon rainforest. Variety has the trailer and statements from two associate producers, Walter Salles, who says “the direction is inspired, precise, and devoid of sentimentalism,” and Luc Dardenne, who hails “the emergence of a truly remarkable filmmaker.”

Venice’s Critics’ Week was founded forty years ago and is run by the Union of Italian Film Critics. This year’s Grand Prize went to Duong Dieu Linh’s Don’t Cry Butterfly, which Josh Slater-Williams, writing for IndieWire, calls a “high-energy, vividly surreal debut feature, which playfully probes topics of marriage, mother-daughter relationships, and troublesome barriers of communication with nuance and wit. Chief among the elusive sights are leaks in an apartment building that only women can see.”

A special mention went to No Sleep Till, which finds a Florida community bracing for a hurricane. “Produced by Omnes Films, the same house that spawned two of this year’s best Cannes premieres—Carson Lund’s Eephus and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point—Alexandra Simpson’s feature debut is powered by the same friction that fueled those two films,” writes Leonardo Goi in the Notebook, “between our need for community and the forces that inevitably pull us apart.” At the heart of No Sleep Till “lies an unresolved contradiction between the way the storm brings strangers together and the inescapable loneliness each of them harbors; it’s as if the hurricane hasn’t demagnetized just their survival instincts, but their emotional and social compasses, too.”