Coup de Chance (2023)

Coup-de-Chance-(2023)
Coup de Chance (2023)

Coup de Chance

I have had the opportunity to be part of the Venice Biennale College every year, and this time I will continue to take part in its projects while sharing my thoughts about them with other good hearted colleagues and excellent critics like Time magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek, San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle, protean freelancer Chris Vognar, Pierre Ehrenreich from Positif or Sarah Einhorn Hielm from Finnish publication Hufvudstadsbladet. Critic and scholar Peter Cowie among other things the author of the best book about “The Godfather,” but also of a recent personal account of Japanese cinema is presiding over this panel (the word “beloved” only begins to describe how much his fellow critics love him), and Savina Neirotti, who runs the Biennale College program, is also at the table with us.

Inflation has been on everybody’s mind for a few years now; even this program knows it. It used to give those 150,000 euros over three feature films; now it gives them 200,000 euros. The filmmakers come to Venice twice. They workshop their projects here first in director/producer pairs and then they present them at the festival where we are going to hear from them. The movies can be provocative it’s a unique experience for both filmmakers and critics which has led to some amazing work that was sometimes very hard-sell. This is how you may have heard of such Biennale presentations as “This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection,” “The Fits,” “My Father, The Devil,” or “The Cathedral.”

While overall very strong in terms of showcasing work from Asian and African countries (in fact one wonders if they should change their name), this year’s features are more western than usual. And they’re all strikingly old well-aged, one might say and each different in tone.

The Mexican “Lumbrensueño,” by Jose Pablo Escamilla and Nicolasa Ruiz, is a coming of age movie that takes a fresh tack by not telling its story linearly but instead presenting long stretches of the future artist’s inner life. The teenage protagonist works at a burger joint; his boss notices he likes film and asks him to make a promo for the joint. His best friend at work is a socially awkward anime freak (an “otaku,” as they say) who brings new visions into his life. The title means “Fire Dreams,” and the imagery lives up to it.

“L’anno dell’Uovo” (“Year of the Egg”), an Italian production, is an enchanting film that will take viewers where they mostly won’t expect unless they’ve been paying extremely close attention. It sets up a couple newly in the present day having their childbearing process supervised at some kind of ashram where the egg is an object of worship, there is also a peculiar tension building throughout well-built by director Claudio Casale which some notes suggest may be satirical. But this movie is after something else, something enigmatic but also jolting

“Arni” is a Hungarian film directed by Dorka Vermes that is very, very Hungarian. A circus comes to a village that’s in just as bad shape. The title character is the outfit’s odd jobs guy and whipping boy. Whipping boy and then some; in one shocking shot, we see him having sex with himself through the circus’ fire-twirler. There are problems among the performers, like how their worn thin animal acts are falling apart. This has got nerve as a character study, these miserable people aren’t conventionally attractive, but they’re depicted with raw honesty and compassion. Eventually Arni gets a little status by working with a python of fearsome aspect picked up by the troupe. A friend told me they couldn’t watch this film because they’re snake-averse like that. Too bad, it’s great.

At the panel, we talked about the films and what had to be done to get them distributed. I worked myself into quite a lather over this one: I remember back in 2015 saying streaming services would open thrilling new avenues for cinematic art, but hearing from most of them since especially after WGA and SAG struck just tells you these things are actively anti-art in business practice at this point. We learned a lot from the filmmakers themselves here tonight. José Pablo Escamilla (“JP”), co-director of “Lumbrensueño,” talked about building his film around different ideas he had written down in his notebook for separate projects. Dorka Vermes said she was surprised during editing on “Arni” to put together an opening sequence of ten minutes without dialogue that she didn’t necessarily know was coming. Claudio Casale envisioned “Year of the Egg,” 100 years from now: “we will have an entirely abstract language for film narrative.” These guys should be given credit both for artistic nerve and for craft, although my colleague Mick LaSalle complained that he didn’t find the films dramatic enough. It was a spirited session. I hope you get to see them.

I saw 20 movies at this festival more than I can usually manage, for some reason. A few among them that really impressed me included Bertrand Bonello’s ingenious and disturbing “The Beast”; Arturo Ripstein’s 1996 “Deep Crimson,” in a director’s cut that left everybody with their jaws on the floor; Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man,” which is NOT what it sounds like (it’s a comedy/thriller that’s equally charming and nerve-wracking and ethically challenging), and Woody Allen’s “Coup de Chance,” which is a tight little French-language thriller that also happens to be, among other things, the world’s longest mother in law joke. It’s been a while since Allen made one this good, and because I pointed that out I’ve been seeing pictures of Jeffrey Epstein in my social media feed; but as Allen himself would say, given the ultimate point of this film, that’s life.

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