During the 2024 Venice Film Festival, IndieWire will update this article every day with a review of the day’s screenings, activities, and news.
Day one
Cinema is not dead, long live cinema! (Pronounced Cheenima.)
The Venice Film Festival—also known as La Biennale, as it’s known on the Lido—kicked off its 81st edition on Wednesday, August 28, with a talky day of press conferences, a world premiere and the awarding of the Golden Lion to an American film icon. And it’s a particularly hot day, with temperatures in the 30s (or over 80 degrees Fahrenheit; I’m trying to put on my Italian accent here) and visitors sweating well into the night in non-air-conditioned venues like the Sala Grande. Warning: Bring a paper fan.
Last year’s Venice festival was short of top talent due to the ongoing strikes by screenwriters and actors at the time. That won’t be the case in 2024, when all the stars of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Warner Bros., September 6) could attend the world premiere, not just Tim Burton and his girlfriend Monica Bellucci (who plays the soul-stealing succubus villain in the sequel to the 1988 cult classic), but also Michael Keaton, Jenna Ortega (whose cheering audience screamed en masse as she walked the red carpet in front of the Sala Grande), Catherine O’Hara, Willem Dafoe and Justin Theroux.
Also on the carpet were Venice staples such as Cate Blanchett – who stars in director Alfonso Cuarón’s out-of-competition TV series premiere “Disclaimer,” which premiered Thursday – along with jury president Isabelle Huppert and her contingent of filmmakers on the competition panel. Apparently, an alleged feud between Huppert and director James Gray, dating back to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, is over: The two sat next to each other during the opening ceremony. It’s a long-standing legend among arthouse film nerds that Gray and Huppert clashed on the jury she chaired that awarded the Palme d’Or to her close collaborator Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon.”
Earlier, filmmakers on a jury with Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera and the jury presidents of other sections, including “Leave No Trace” director Debra Granik on the Horizons jury, expressed their concern about the ailing state of cinema. “I’m worried about the things that everyone is worried about: making sure that cinema survives, because it’s very weak now,” said Huppert. This year’s main Venice competition includes 21 world premieres by directors such as Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar and Pablo Larraín. And oh, what a lucky day for him, because his film “Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie, has just been sold to Netflix, which now has two contenders for the Best Actress award in its ranks, alongside Cannes winner of “Emilia Perez,” Karla Sofía Gascón, who just received a spectacular profile in the New York Times.
“We understand that the generations gathered here need (the Venice Film Festival) to continue telling stories that are not covered in the mainstream… Festivals today are perhaps festivals of resistance,” said Granik. “Swimming against the tide. This festival has 80 years of solidity and mobility. It doesn’t get old and you don’t get stale yourself.” Will cinema become a rare thing of the past that only thrives in the bubble of a film festival? This is a question that many people are asking themselves.
During the opening ceremony, Sigourney Weaver received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, accompanied by a clip show of her best work, from “Get away from her, you bitch!” in “Aliens” (and recently reused to blunt effect in “Romulus”) to her satin-clad seductress in “Ghostbusters.” A visibly nervous and humbled Weaver read a printed speech and thanked Barbera and his team for that “jet fuel of encouragement” in the form of the Golden Lion statuette, joking that she may be too big for Hollywood to ever pigeonhole.
Later in the evening, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice received a robust but hardly submissive three-minute (or was it four?) standing ovation in the Sala Grande. The macabre afterlife comedy, which sees Burton return to mischievous form thanks to clever creature makeup and special effects, was just OK in my view of the room – the dark laughs didn’t always land, especially as the film attempts to update its ’80s sensibility with a contemporary perspective, often using Frankenstein and exquisite corpse cliches from the original (like the shrunken heads that populate the underworld, or the sand monster in the original’s eerie desert wandering into an underworld of the damned), albeit with a little tweaking. These standing ovations are arbitrary anyway, often depending on how long the cast and crew stay in the theater to receive applause and the nerve-wracking intensity of the stage lighting.
Stay tuned for more on the 2024 Venice Film Festival tomorrow, when “Maria” will have its world premiere and bring Angelina Jolie to the Lido just days before her ex (but not ex-husband!) Brad Pitt arrives here by water taxi to attend the premiere of “Wolfs.” He is also an executive producer of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” but did not show up tonight.
