Morality tales and Catholic ‘cameos’ at Venice Film Festival 2024

The Catholic Church has had a front row seat at previous editions of the Venice Film Festival with the likes of the controversial Spotlight and The Last Temptation of Christ.

At this year’s 81st rendition of the festival, Catholicism was reduced to cameo appearances. Though the film that won the coveted Golden Lion award dealt with a topic that the Church is finding itself increasingly caught up with: euthanasia.

This came courtesy Pedro Almodóvar, who was back at the Venice Lido with his first English language film The Room Next Door. In this cautionary tale about euthanasia, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore play childhood friends who reconnect in later life when Tilda’s character is diagnosed with cancer. She puts Julianne’s character in an invidious position by begging her to assist in her euthanasia, having purchased a euthanasia pill on the dark web.

Euthanasia was legalised in Spain in 2021, while Almodóvar believes “there should be the possibility to have euthanasia all over the world”. This profound meditation on love, pain and death was a popular winner of the coveted Golden Lion.

Tim Burton’s excellent Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opened the festival running from 28 August to 7 September at Venice Lido in Italy.

The sequel to the 1987 hit reunited Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder with Hollywood’s hottest young star, Jenna Ortega playing Winona Ryder’s unruly daughter. At one point, Winona Ryder despairs at her daughter’s uncontrollable behaviour with the stinging remark: “God punishes us through our children.”

Given Italy’s peerless operatic heritage, it was fitting that Venice hosted the world premiere of Pablo Larrain’s Maria about the tragic opera singer Maria Callas, played with gusto by Angelina Jolie. Even though Callas had married the Catholic industrialist, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, she remained a practising Greek Orthodox.

“She tried to adapt to our Catholic liturgy,” Meneghini once observed, “but she preferred her own Orthodox liturgy.” In the film, Maria is living in retirement in Paris and contemplating a return to performing. Angelina Jolie gives a career best performance and is likely to be Oscar nominated but at Venice she missed out on the Best Actress Award to Nicole Kidman.

Morality tales and marital infidelity were at the core of this year’s rendition of the festival. The steamy Babygirl was an erotic showcase for the talents of Nicole Kidman in which she plays a high-flying CEO who cheats on her theatre director husband (Antonio Banderas) by having a torrid affair with a much younger company intern.

Cate Blanchett takes the sexually charged lead role in Alfonso Cuaron’s new TV series, Disclaimer, opposite Kevin Klein. Blanchett plays a documentarian (married to Sacha Baron Cohen) whose past affair comes back to haunt her in the pages of a novel which has the ominous disclaimer: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”

Luca Guadagnino unveiled his adaptation of William S Burroughs’s semiautobiographical classic Queer, starring Daniel Craig who embarks on an unrequited love affair with a young navy officer. Craig ventures on an ill-fated trip to the Mexican jungle to experience ayahuasca where he encounters a demented botanist played by Lesley Manville. Ayahuasca “isn’t a portal to another place”, she warns portentously. “It’s a mirror — and you may not like what you see.”

The Catholic Church’s most prominent appearance came via a somewhat cliched manner in the Italian comedy, Diva Futura. Named after the real-life agency behind the careers of porn stars such as La Ciccolina, who gained notoriety for being the first woman to bare her breasts on live Italian television in 1978, before venturing into politics and being elected to the Italian Parliament in 1987, the comedy portrays an Italian priest having an affair with one of the clients of the agency.

Joaquin Phoenix reprises his role as the titular character, Arthur Fleck, in Joker: Folie à Deux, with Lady Gaga playing his twisted paramour, Lee Quinn. Fleck is incarcerated for much of the film in the rowdy Arkham Asylum and he and his fellow depraved prisoners have a sardonic ritual of singing When the Saints Come Marching In upon being woken each morning by their cruel prison guards.

One of the best sequences in the film is when Lady Gaga gives a spirited rendition of Gonna Build a Mountain, a gospel song that was inspired by Luke 1:19-26. This becomes their anthem. The theme of religion and the Lord makes an unexpected appearance in the film’s final moments. After Lady Gaga tells the Joker that she is pregnant with their child, he quietly contemplates his mortality (and legacy) while on Death Row, saying:

“When I’ve built that heaven as I will someday
And the Lord sends Gabriel to take me away,
Wanna fine young son to take my place.
I’ll leave a son in my heaven on earth with the Lord’s good grace.”

In Walter Salles’ true-life story I’m Still Here, former Congressman Rubens Paiv,a is arrested by soldiers in front of his family during the military dictatorship of 1970s Brazil. He is never seen again. The search for truth lasted decades with his wife running a spirited campaign to find out what happened.

It concludes with a tear-jerking moment when the family finally secure a Death Certificate 30 years after Rubens’ death in an acknowledgment that the State was complicit in his murder, despite his body never being found. The film won Best Screenplay and received the Ecumenical Prize from the SIGNIS Jury.

The era of Nazi Germany was examined in two contrasting documentaries. Leni Riefenstahl’s extraordinary life and career and the extent of her Nazi collaboration is the focus of Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl through unfettered access to her archive including phone calls that Leni recorded with Albert Speer.

Riefenstahl is confronted on German television by a contemporary of hers, a housewife, who suggests that she should have confronted Hitler. Leni angrily responds that very few people stood up to Hitler and those who did, did not survive, alleging that even Churchill was an admirer of Hitler in the early days. Viewers are bound to be reminded of Edmund Burke’s famous phrase that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.

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Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler’s engrossing documentary From Darkness to Light featured a series of interviews with the Jewish comedian Jerry Lewis about his infamous unfinished film The Day the Clown Cried. Lewis stars as a comedian who entertains children in a concentration camp and is forced by the Nazis to lead the kids into the gas chamber. The film was never released, mainly because Lewis decided ultimately that it would be a career ending fiasco if a comedy about the Holocaust was released, concluding that it was acceptable to poke fun at Nazis, but not at the Holocaust.

Over the years, Golden Lion winners like Spotlight, Poor Things and Brokeback Mountain have gone on to Oscar glory. But it is too early in the awards season to assume that The Room Next Door will follow in their hallowed footsteps when the golden statuette is handed out at the Dolby Theatre on 2 March.

Photo: (left to right) Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodovar and Julianne Moore attend the ‘The Room Next Door’ red carpet event during the 81st Venice International Film Festival, Venice, Italy, 2 September 2024. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.)

Dr. Frank Mannion is a film director and academic whose new film Oxbridge is currently in production.

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