Guillermo del Toro\u2019s The Shape of Water has won the Golden Lion at this year\u2019s Venice International Film Festival. We\u2019ve been gathering reviews here, and we\u2019ll carry on, too, as the film screens in Toronto throughout the coming week.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s jury, presided over by Annette Bening and including Ildiko Enyedi, Michel Franco, Rebecca Hall, Anna Mouglalis, David Stratton, Jasmine Trinca, Edgar Wright, and Yonfan, also presented the following awards:<\/p>\n
Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize: Samuel Maoz\u2019s Foxtrot. Click the title for reviews.<\/p>\n
Silver Lion Best Director: Xavier Legrand\u2019s Custody. \u201cAn almost unbearably-tense, no-holds-barred drive through the nightmare of domestic terrorism, Custody is a can\u2019t-look-away hybrid of grueling reality and heightened cinematic technique,\u201d writes Screen\u2019s Fionnuala Halligan. \u201cThe mix is jarring, as intended, and this wrenching, heart-stopping film illustrates domestic violence and obsession in a way that makes the fear real. Yet the director also cites The Shining and Kramer vs. Kramer amongst his influences, and they\u2019re easily identified here too.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSadly,\u201d finds Ethan Vestby, writing for Cinema Scope, \u201cCustody soon becomes conventionally dull once the child, Julien (Thomas Gioria), actually comes into the picture. Put under the shared custody of his parents due to his father\u2019s good behaviour in court, he\u2019s soon emotionally terrorized by the patriarch during his allotted visitation time, as Dad is still bitter over his wife and 18-year-old daughter\u2019s abandonment of him. Julien becomes unwillingly sucked into his father\u2019s emotional vortex, which seems like it might be leading towards an unfortunate resolution for his mother Miriam (Lea Drucker).\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLegrand here takes the basic idea and the two adult stars from his Oscar-nominated short, Just Before Losing Everything from 2013, to explore similar territory as it lays bare the tensions, lies and faulty defense mechanisms of the separated parents as well as their teenage kids,\u201d writes Boyd van Hoeij in the Hollywood Reporter. \u201cConfidently assembled and acted with impressive precision, this striking debut feature finally doesn\u2019t fully convince psychologically but is nonetheless a more than solid calling card for Legrand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Volpi Cup for Best Actress: Charlotte Rampling, for her performance in Hannah. \u201cHannah is a bit of a paradox,\u201d finds Michael Sicinski, writing for Cinema Scope: \u201cit is an exceedingly quiet movie, and at the same time a bracing one, with a volatile, superstar performance at its heart. Charlotte Rampling plays the title character, a woman whose life has been dramatically upended just as she and her husband (Andr\u00e9 Wilms) should be settling into their mundane golden years. Instead, he has been sent to prison, and Hannah, while initially playing the supportive wife, becomes increasingly uncertain of her role. In fact, this is a film with performance at its core.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSixteen years after Fran\u00e7ois Ozon\u2019s Under the Sand appeared to offer the actress her definitive later-career showcase, she shows no signs of artistic complacency in Italian director Andrea Pallaoro\u2019s close, piercing character examination,\u201d writes Variety\u2019s Guy Lodge. \u201cVulnerably balanced on a slender emotional ledge for ninety minutes, Rampling\u2019s low-pitched but emotionally unstinting performance must implicitly fill in many of the blanks in an enigmatic story of a respectable, retirement-age woman gathering (or perhaps gradually disassembling) her life after her husband is arrested and imprisoned on uncertain charges.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRampling gives an emotionally rigorous display of bruising internalization, without an ounce of vanity,\u201d agrees David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. \u201cWhile Italian-born director Andrea Pallaoro showed promise with his 2013 debut Medeas, an elegant contemporary twist on Greek tragedy, this second feature is an exercise in miserabilism that withholds far more than it yields.\u201d<\/p>\n
More from Camillo De Marco at Cineuropa. Hannah now begins screening in the Contemporary World Cinema section in Toronto. Update: \u201cIf Virginia Woolf had bothered to write Clarissa Dalloway as the wife of an incarcerated felon, she might have looked something like Rampling\u2019s Hannah,\u201d writes Nicholas Bell at Ioncinema. \u201cAchingly morose, Hannah is an arrhythmic piece of beautifully composed, carefully deliberated miserabilism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Volpi Cup for Best Actor: Kamel El Basha for The Insult.<\/p>\n
Best Screenplay Award: Martin McDonagh for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.<\/p>\n
Special Jury Prize: Warwick Thornton\u2019s Sweet Country. Variety\u2019s Guy Lodge: \u201cMarked by the same poise and care with which Thornton\u2019s 2009 debut Samson and Delilah exposed the present-day marginalization of Australia\u2019s Aboriginal community, the director-cinematographer\u2019s second purely narrative feature probes the same social injustice in the bitterly divided frontier society of 1929, where one black man\u2019s necessarily violent act of self-defense brings the white population\u2019s most toxic racist dogma to the fore. The spare, classical chase drama that ensues is seeded with barbed observations on colonialism, cultural erasure and rough justice, kept poetically succinct by Thornton\u2019s lithe, soaring visual storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s David Rooney finds that Sweet Country \u201csuccessfully marries the archetypal characters and scenario of a traditional Western with a culturally specific grounding in Australian history, politics, folklore and racial tension.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe performances throughout the film are excellent with [Bryan] Brown, [Sam] Neil and [Hamilton] Morris proving this is a country for old men, at least acting-wise,\u201d writes John Bleasdale at CineVue. \u201cTremayne Trevorn Doolan debuts as the young boy Philomac who is torn between his aboriginal identity and the obvious advantages that come with his white father. Sweet Country is a hoarsely angry film, a powerful denunciation of the racism and violence on which modern Australia was eventually founded.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sweet Country now competes in Toronto\u2019s Platform program.<\/p>\n
Marcello Mastroianni Award: Charlie Plummer for Lean on Pete.<\/p>\n
Among the awards not presented by the jury are the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) award, which goes to Frederick Wiseman\u2019s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (reviews). FIPRESCI\u2019s choice for best debut film is Alireza Khatami\u2019s Oblivion Verses.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn enigmatic, dream-like disquisition on death and the necessity of remembrance, Oblivion Verses is nothing if not cosmopolitan. Shot in Chile and prefaced by a quotation from German poet Paul Celan, this Spanish-language debut from Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami has, viewed from one perspective, a universality that should help it connect with admirers of a sensibility that could loosely be termed \u2018magic realist,\u2019\u201d writes Jonathan Romney for Screen. \u201cFrom a different angle, however, the difficulty of attaching this pensive fable to any geographical or historical specifics makes it feel frustratingly elusive. Nevertheless, Khatami\u2014best known for the co-directed short Mr. Chang\u2019s New Address, featured in 2013 portmanteau Taipei Factory\u2014manifestly has an idiosyncratic vision.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBlending elements of magical realism, political strife and Kafkaesque ennui to partially satisfying effect, Oblivion Verses (Los Versos del Olvido) marks an intriguing if rather elusive feature debut for Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami,\u201d writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter.<\/p>\n
Michael Sicinski for Cinema Scope: \u201cAs political cinema goes, Oblivion Verses is rather dull-edged; in some respects its intent is patently obvious, in others rather oblique. There seems to be an allegory at work here, but it\u2019s difficult to separate that broader, symbolic approach from a nagging sense that there is specificity hovering in the margins, unwilling or unable to speak its piece. It seems Khatami originally wanted to make the film in Iran but couldn\u2019t get permission, so the Chilean setting was a second choice. This knowledge perhaps opens Oblivion Verses to unfair scrutiny, but I think it explains its formal inconsistencies. Khatami\u2019s resuscitation effort is indeed admirable, but noble intentions do not necessarily equal enlightenment.\u201d<\/p>\n
More from Marta Ba\u0142aga at Cineuropa, where she interviews Khatami. The next stop for Oblivion Verses is the Discovery section in Toronto.<\/p>\n
The Queer Lion goes to Anne Fontaine\u2019s Reinventing Marvin<\/strong>. \u201cA golden-lit, refracted sequence of close-ups of a male body in motion\u2014individual muscles stretching, flexing, tensing\u2014opens Reinventing Marvin, as we assume we\u2019re watching a dancer in preparation for an arduous ballet,\u201d begins Variety\u2019s Guy Lodge. \u201cWe\u2019re partly right: He\u2019s an actor, not a dancer, readying himself for the spotlight. What he faces there, however, is not tricky footwork or strenuous physical performance, but the hard facts of his past. Skipping liberally across formative stages of a once-denigrated gay man\u2019s self-made life, Anne Fontaine\u2019s unsteady, overlong but rewardingly compassionate character study documents the painful coming of age that builds to cathartic creative process.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe films of prolific director Anne Fontaine range from the serious (Agnus Dei, Nathalie) to the ridiculous (Perfect Mothers) to the slickly entertaining (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel, Gemma Bovery),\u201d writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. Reinventing Marvin is a \u201cqueer coming-of-age story, which she mixes into a confessional performance piece that includes, among other fourth wall-breaking elements, Isabelle Huppert co-starring as herself. The result is a hodgepodge that blends a few emotionally poignant moments with uncomfortable stabs at kitchen-sink drama and more blissful scenes of sexual healing (including a sequence that features the actual song by Marvin Gaye). It\u2019s all a bit overlong and over-the-top, although the lead turn from rising star Finnegan Oldfield (Nocturama) is almost enough to make it work.\u201d<\/p>\n In Screen, Lisa Nesselson agrees that \u201cOldfield is riveting in an ethereal way as the title character, a sensitive soul (wonderfully played as a youngster by Jules Poirier) born into a sub-poverty-level working class family in a culturally vacant village where smoking, drinking, watching TV, spouting casually racist and homophobic remarks and badmouthing vegetables to defiantly eat fries with every meal are the main pastimes. How Marvin extricates himself from his dead-end origins to connect with his sexuality in Paris circles where he can forge an It-Boy career in the theater is the creatively told, worthwhile but still hackneyed tale on display.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhile the story of this \u2018ugly duckling\u2019 and his \u2018guardian angels\u2019 might seem a bit too much like a fairy tale to some, the air of melancholy infused by the filmmaker gives Reinventing Marvin a seal of authenticity that makes this feature film masterful and moving,\u201d writes Fabien Lemercier for Cineuropa.<\/p>\n