83rd Venice International Film Festival
The Venice Film Festival has always been unusually hospitable to horror, having premiered Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” just last year. The competition this time includes two more horror films, “Company” and “The Spiral,” though both are coy about their affiliations, withholding their genre credentials until late in the game. Each is interesting and technically accomplished enough to justify its place in competition. It is the festival’s other choices that are harder to ignore. “Company” is directed by Casey Affleck, an accused sexual harasser. The classics sidebar, meanwhile, includes Roman Polanski’s “Cul-de-sac.” It would appear that #MeToo is over, at least in Venice.
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Vlad Cioplea/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
The World to Come (2021)
Why are so many movies about lesbians historical dramas? For the same reason there are so few movies about writers: Modern lesbianism isn’t cinematic. Nowadays, if a woman is unhappily married, she can just get divorced; she won't starve to death. If someone wants to experiment with their sexuality, it’s no big deal. And if a woman is unsure whether or not she is attracted to the new neighbor lady, she can look up the language she needs to articulate it online. That kind of drama is almost entirely internal, and emotional, which on film is about as interesting as watching a critic write a review.
But back in the day real life had no such easy assists. In 1856, in upstate New York, farmwives were hemmed in by their daily round of chores and responsibilities. The loneliness and isolation is baked into the daily bread. For the marriage of Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Affleck), there is the added complication of grief. As the opening sequence establishes, their only daughter recently died of diphtheria, and they are both staggering in circles of pain and misery, capable of daily survival but little more. But then the large farm down the lane is rented out to a new couple, Finney (Christopher Abbott) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby). The women notice each other, and the men notice them noticing.
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Magnolia Pictures
James Gray aptly summed up the sideshow atmosphere that’s engulfed “Two Lovers,” his latest film.
Followed into the press roundtable room at Manhattan’s Regency Hotel by Casey Affleck – there filming a documentary about brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix’s sudden inexplicable transition from actor to rapper – the clearly agitated filmmaker turned around and virulently tossed him out.
Continue reading “Where’s Joaldo?” »
