This past Wednesday, Sept. 1, the 61st edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off with a gala screening of Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, a box-office and critical disappointment in the United States, where it opened more than two months ago.
At the festival's press screening, The Terminal received an equally unenthusiastic reception. Yet, none of that matters to festival organizers, who surely didn't pick Spielberg's latest production because of its cinematic qualities. What matters is that both Spielberg and The Terminal's star, Tom Hanks, were on hand for the gala evening — a surefire way to guarantee worldwide coverage for the festival.
"I wanted a festival of quality films for mass audiences," claims festival director Marco Muller. "But if the Venice Film Festival is really going to be useful it has to create the conditions so that more fragile films will finally find a distributor and an audience."
Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Jonathan Demme, Angelina Jolie, and John Travolta are among the many Hollywood celebrities attending or expected to attend the festival in order to, huh, help movies made by little- or lesser-known filmmakers reach the screens of Vancouver, London, and Beijing. (In their initial English-language report about the festival, Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France Presse made no mention of any non-American celebrity attendees, with the exception of Golden Lion presenter and part-time Hollywood star Sophia Loren.)
Now, despite all the media emphasis on American stars, the festival is not going to be solely about Hollywood glitz. Indeed, more than seventy features from around the globe will be presented, including many world premieres.
Twenty-one films are vying for the Golden Lion awards, including Mar adentro / The Sea Inside, Alejandro Amenábar's real-life-inspired drama starring Javier Bardem as a tetraplegic man fighting for the right to assisted suicide; Mike Leigh's Vera Drake, the story of an abortionist (Imelda Staunton) in 1950s England; and Mira Nair's adaptation of Thackeray's 19th-century novel Vanity Fair, with Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp.
Also, Claire Denis' L'Intrus / The Intruder; Gianni Amelio's Le Chiavi di casa / The Keys to the House, with Kim Rossi Stuart and Charlotte Rampling; and Jonathan Glazer's Birth, starring Nicole Kidman.
Two other important (and potentially controversial) contenders are Land of Plenty (above), Wim Wenders' downbeat exploration of life in the United States following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and François Ozon's 5×2, about the five stages of romance between a man and a woman.
Among the out-of-competition fare are: Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock (above); veteran Claude Chabrol's La Demoiselle d'honneur / The Bridesmaid, with Benoît Magimel; Jonathan Demme's political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, with Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and Liev Schreiber; Eros, an amalgam of three erotic short films directed by nonagenarian Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh, and Wong Kar Wai; and O Quinto Império / The Fifth Empire, the latest effort by another nonagenarian filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira.
Additionally, Joe Dante and Quentin Tarantino will host a retrospective named "The Italian Kings of the B's."
The festival's nine-person jury is headed by British director John Boorman. Other jurors include director Spike Lee, and actresses Scarlett Johansson, and Helen Mirren. The Golden Lion and other awards will be handed out on September 11.