Best Actress went to Nicole Kidman for “Bad Girl”
Photo: REUTERS.
The Venetian audience applauded Pedro Almodóvar’s film “The Room Next Door” for 17 minutes straight, an incredible and sensational success. The president of the jury, Isabelle Huppert (who has known the Spanish classic for a thousand years, although she has never acted with it) fully shared the feelings of the tearful audience, and Almodóvar received the main prize of the festival, the Golden Lion.
Almodóvar received the festival’s main award, the Golden Lion.
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“The Next Room” (or “The Room Next Door,” as it is clumsily translated here) is the first full-length English-language project by the maestro, who was previously very afraid to shoot in any language other than Spanish, suspecting that he would not be able to control all the nuances of the actors’ performances, all the subtleties of the sound of this or that phrase. He approached the project slowly, first shooting two short films in English. One of them, The Human Voice, starred the great British actress Tilda Swinton; she also stars here, playing Martha, a former war correspondent who is in the hospital with stage three cancer. She has very little chance of recovery. She meets up with her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore), whom she has not seen for years, and the two women have long conversations about life and death. Critics note that this is Almodóvar’s most serious film, even comparing it to Bergman’s films (who would have imagined this a quarter of a century ago?).
The second most important award, the Silver Lion, went to the film Vermiglio by Italian Maura Delpero. She is 48 years old, but this is only her second full-length work – a story about life in an Italian village during World War II. Everyone admires the way the film was shot, and, by the way, it was shot by our compatriot Mikhail Krichman, who worked on Andrei Zvyagintsev’s films and proved to be an incredibly skilled cameraman.
Maura Delpero
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Brady Corbet was named best director for his three-and-a-half-hour epic “Brutalist,” the story of Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a Holocaust survivor who comes to America to realize his potential. He faces poverty, but then finds a client: billionaire Harrison Lee van Buren (Guy Pearce). The relationship turns out to be extremely confusing and complex, with Van Buren either hiring or firing Toth… Tellingly, this is not a biopic of a real architect, but a figment of Corbet’s imagination, who is said to have spent seven years on his dream project.
Brady Corbett was named Best Director.
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The special jury prize went to Georgian director Dei Kulumbegashvili’s April, a gloomy and, to put it mildly, arthouse film not intended for a wide audience, about a doctor who delivers babies or performs abortions on villagers.
Deya Kulumbegashvili
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Frenchman Vincent Lindon was chosen as best actor for “The Quiet Son” (original title: “Playing with Fire”). This is a film about a guy who became a Nazi, committed a murder and was behind bars for many years, and his father, who tragically lives through this story (Lyndon plays the latter).
Frenchman Vincent Lindon was chosen as best actor
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Well, the best actress award went to Nicole Kidman for the film “Bad Girl” (it will be released in our cinemas on January 16). Her heroine is the CEO of a large company who is unhappy with her marriage (even though her husband is played by Antonio Banderas). Having met a beautiful intern (Harris Dickinson, star of “Triangle of Sadness”), the woman, now middle-aged, does everything she can with him, putting her career and her family at stake.
Nicole Kidman won the Best Actress award
Photo: REUTERS.
Among the losers in the acting categories are Angelina Jolie, who played the decadent Maria Callas in Chilean director Pedro Larraín’s Maria (she even bravely sang some of her own songs). Jude Law plays an FBI agent fighting a powerful fascist organization in The Silent Brotherhood. And Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in the film Joker: Madness for Two. The first “Joker” unexpectedly won at Venice in 2019, becoming a sensation; the sequel was praised by critics, but the jury chose to ignore it entirely.
Angelina Jolie lost to Kidman.
Photo: REUTERS.
