According To The variety It has not been, it’s safe to say, an all-timer Venice Competition lineup. Despite that, rumor has it that the 81st edition’s jury, presided over by Isabelle Huppert and comprising filmmakers James Gray, Andrew Haigh, Agnieszka Holland, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Abderrahmane Sissako, Giuseppe Tornatore, Julia von Heinz and actress Zhang Ziyi, took some time to come to their decisions during a prolonged deliberation session yesterday.
Speculation was also rife that, insofar as festival juries pay much attention to precedent, due to the string of high-profile US films that have won Venice in recent years (five of the last seven Golden Lions have gone to a US production, or in the case of last year’s “Poor Things,” co-production) they might have been discouraged from awarding the top prize to another American, or even American-led movie.
That story shifted slightly in the days following the premiere of “The Brutalist,” as the 3h15m-long film, directed by Brady Corbet, starring Adrien Brody and described by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman as “paced with a pleasing stateliness and overflow[ing] with incident and emotion,” quickly took over poll position on critics’ grids. It was the closest thing to a major-event movie that the festival fielded this year, but in the end did not take the top prize as had been breathlessly predicted. Instead, the Golden Lion went to two-time Academy Award-winner Pedro Almodóvar’s death-with-dignity drama, “The Room Next Door,” described by Gleiberman as “a deceptively plainspoken but artful voyage into the river of emotion that accompanies the impulse to end one’s life.” It stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, both of whom the director thanked during his charming, largely Spanish-language acceptance speech, which he justified by saying at the outset “This is my first movie in English but the spirit is Spanish.” Of course this Golden Lion is actually Almodóvar’s second (he was awarded an honorary one in 2019), and perhaps should have been more hotly tipped than it was, as “The Room Next Door” had already picked up the unofficial Callused Palm Award for Longest Standing Ovation, when it clocked a 17-minute-long round of applause at its premiere, and Variety’s stopwatch guy had to be given fluids for exhaustion. Almodóvar is such an ebullient presence on the world cinema stage that it’s impossible to begrudge him any success, but perhaps the night’s most quietly gratifying win was the festival’s second-highest award, the Grand Jury Prize, going to Maura Delpero’s beautifully restrained “Vermiglio.” The Variety review calls it “a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps” and Jury president Isabelle Huppert expressed her own fervent admiration, at the post-award press conference, for its slanted take as a war story without any war in it. “It’s like you have a great offscreen subject matter, but you get to see what’s going on only through a small eye, through the latch of a door,” she said. “Vermiglio” was only outdone in breathtaking formalist austerity by Special Jury Prize-winner Déa Kulumbegashvili’s extraordinary “April,” which Variety’s Guy Lodge called “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.” There is a small but fervent contingent on the Lido who would have liked to have seen this strikingly visionary work take a higher prize, if for no other reason than it manages the singular trick of remaining eternally surprising despite its apparent slowness. “Vermiglio” was only outdone in breathtaking formalist austerity by Special Jury Prize-winner Déa Kulumbegashvili’s extraordinary “April,” which Variety’s Guy Lodge called “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.” There is a small but fervent contingent on the Lido who would have liked to have seen this strikingly visionary work take a higher prize, if for no other reason than it manages the singular trick of remaining eternally surprising despite its apparent slowness.