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.
There was a similar rationale, according to Huppert behind the jury’s choice of Walter Salles’ “deeply poignant” “I’m Still Here” for Best Screenplay. Oftentimes this is an award that goes to a film more as a marker of the jury’s inability to agree on what higher prize it should take, than for its script specifically. But here Huppert said of the movie, which is set during the brutally repressive Brazilian military dicatorship, “You know the events, but the story never really takes you where you think it’s going to go, and I think that’s really the quality of the screenplay.”
On behalf of the jury, Huppert also sent her love and commiserations to Nicole Kidman, who was absent from the ceremony where she was awarded the Best Actress award for her fantastically sly and challenging turn — described as “fearless” by Gleiberman — in Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” due a sudden bereavement. Earlier, accepting the award on her behalf, Reijn had read out the following message from the actress: “Today, I arrived in Venice to find out shortly after that my brave and beautiful mother Janelle Ann Kidman has just passed. I’m in shock and I have to go to my family. But this award is for her. She shaped me, she guided me and she made me. I am beyond grateful that I get to say her name to all of you through Halina. The collision of life and art is heartbreaking. My heart is broken.”
It was a speech so raw and touching that it clearly affected Brady Corbet who soon after was up to accept his Best Director award for “The Brutalist,” and who haltingly offered his condolences to Kidman as well. But he soon hit his stride, thanking a very large part of his film’s very large cast and crew by name, before asserting that “The world is often cruel to artists, architects and immigrants alike,”and going on to express his solidarity with the community of filmmakers who “support each other and tell the Goliath corporations that try and push us around, ‘No, it’s three and a half hours long and it’s on 70mm.’” He ended his acceptance in impassioned form, insisting “We have the vision for a better cinema, a better world for my beautiful daughter and each and every one of your beautiful children, irrespective of their fucking passports. They deserve the world without borders, something boundless, something new.”
Corbet’s abstractly political rhetoric was echoed elsewhere by award-winners such as Bogdan Mureşanu, the Romanian director of the top prizewinner in the Horizons sidebar, “The New Year That Never Came” as he highlighted its themes of resistance and revolution without necessarily namechecking any particular current conflict. But other awardees took a more direct stance. Scandar Copti, whose “Happy Holidays” took the Horizons Best Screenplay Award, stated “I stand here deeply honored yet profoundly affected by the difficult times we’re living through. Over the past 11 months, our shared humanity and moral compass have been tested as we witness the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This painful reality reminds us of the devastating consequences of oppression, which is a theme in our film,” adding, to sincere applause “None of us are free until all of us are free.”
But perhaps the most eloquent statement came from the festival’s only multiple winner, Sarah Friedland, whose “Familiar Touch,” praised by Lodge as a film of “intense discomfort and acute tenderness” won three awards: Horizons Best Director, Horizons Best Actress (for lead Kathleen Chalfant) and the Luigi de Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Feature. Having made her heartfelt thank yous to the people directly involved with her film, Friedland went on to state, gravely and unequivocally and to a warmly supportive response ““As a Jewish American artist working in a time-based medium, I must note I am accepting this award on the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and 76th year of occupation. I believe it is our responsibility as film workers to use the institutional platforms through which we work to address Israel’s impunity on the global stage. I stand with the people of Palestine in their struggle for liberation.”
The 81st Venice Film Festival may not have provided the same level of dazzle as previous years, but in several of the more under-the-radar winners, exemplified perhaps best by Friedland, it lived up to Huppert’s optimistic closing-night assertion that “Cinema is in great shape.”
The full list of winners is below:
COMPETITION
Golden Lion for Best Film: “The Room Next Door,” Pedro Almodóvar
Grand Jury Prize: “Vermiglio,” Maura Delpero
Silver Lion for Best Director: Brady Corbet, “The Brutalist”
Special Jury Prize: “April,” Dea Kulumbegashvili
Best Screenplay: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega, “I’m Still Here”
Volpi Cup for Best Actress: Nicole Kidman, “Babygirl”
Volpi Cup for Best Actor: Vincent Lindon, “The Quiet Son”
Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor: Paul Kircher, “And their Children After Them”
HORIZONS
Best Film: “The New Year That Never Came,” Bogdan Mureşanu
Best Director: Sarah Friedland, “Familiar Touch”
Special Jury Prize: “One of Those Days When Hemme Dies,” Murat Firatoglu
Best Actress: Kathleen Chalfant, “Familiar Touch”
Best Actor: Francesco Gheghi, “Familia”
Best Screenplay: Scandar Copti, “Happy Holidays”
Best Short Film: “Who Loves the Sun,” Arshia Shakiba
LION OF THE FUTURE
Luigi de Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Feature: “Familiar Touch,” Sarah Friedland
HORIZONS EXTRA
Audience Award: “The Witness,” Nader Saeivar
VENICE CLASSICS
Best Documentary on Cinema: “Chain Reactions,” Alexandre O. Philippe
Best Restored Film: “Ecce Bombo,” Nanni Moretti
VENICE IMMERSIVE
Grand Jury Prize: “Ito Meikyu,” Boris Labbé
Special Jury Prize: “Oto’s Planet,” Gwenael François
Achievement Prize: “Impulse: Playing With Reality,” Barry Gene Murphy, May Abdalla
GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI (announced earlier)
GdA Director’s Award: “Manas,” Marianna Brennand
Audience Award: “Taxi Monamour,” Ciro De Caro
Europa Cinemas Label Award: “Alpha,” Jan-Willem van Ewijk
CRITICS’ WEEK (announced earlier)
Grand Prize: “Don’t Cry, Butterfly,” Dương Diệu Linh
Special Mention: “No Sleep Till,” Alexandra Simpson
Audience Award: “Paul & Paulette Take a Bath” Jethro Massey
Verona Film Club Award for Most Innovative Film: “Don’t Cry, Butterfly,” Dương Diệu Linh
Mario Serandrei – Hotel Saturnia Award for Best Technical Contribution: “Homegrown,” Michael Premo
Best Short Film: “Things That My Best Friend Lost,” Marta Innocenti
Best Director (Short Film): “Nero Argento,” Francesco Manzato
Best Technical Contribution (Short Film): “At Least I Will Be 8 294 400 Pixel,” Marco Talarico