Yesterday, surprising many prognosticators, the controversial spy thriller Se, Ji / Lust, Caution (above) earned Ang Lee (left) his second Venice Film Festival Golden Lion for best film.
Lee, whose Brokeback Mountain won the Golden Lion in 2005, remarked that his accepting the award "in the shadow of the passing of two great giants, Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, I realize how huge this festival has become."
Lee dedicated his Golden Lion to Bergman, whom he saw while working on Lust, Caution. "Ingmar hugged me the way a mother hugs a child," the Taiwanese director said. "This hug was not for me, it was for you, the keepers of cinema." Bergman died on July 30, and Antonioni the following day.
In Lust, Caution, members of a Chinese resistance group hatch a plan to murder a high-ranking Chinese official in cahoots with Japanese occupiers in the Shanghai of the early 1940s. Things get a little complicated when a resistance spy (newcomer Tang Wei) falls in love with her target (Tony Leung). (Things got even more complicated when China announced that the film's — supposedly — sexually explicit scenes will be cut for release in that country.)
Rodrigo Prieto, who had previously collaborated with Lee in Brokeback Mountain, was given an Osella for best cinematography.
Though Lust, Caution is spoken mostly in Mandarin and other Chinese dialects — in fact, it is the second consecutive Mandarin-language film to win at Venice, following last year's Still Life — English was the language spoken by most of the 2007 Venice winners.
Festival president Marco Mueller made sure that lots of British and American films were included in the Golden Lion competition roster, and even though several British films received raves from critics, U.S. productions dominated the list of winners.
Despite reservations from some critics, Brian De Palma was voted best director for Redacted (above), the sort of film that gives American right-wingers both stomach convulsions and anti-Hollywood ammunition, but that fares well with those who want to make an anti-war/anti-militarism — and perhaps also an anti-nativism — statement.
Redacted is based on the March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl by US servicemen, who then proceeded to slaughter her family. It is also the director's reaction to the sanitized media depiction of the Iraq war in the United States. Nearly twenty years ago, De Palma covered similar ground in his 1989 war drama Casualties of War, which depicts the gang rape and murder of a young girl during the Vietnam War.
Cate Blanchett (right) and Brad Pitt won the Volpi Cup for best actress and actor in, respectively, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. In Haynes' bizarre biopic of Bob Dylan, Blanchett is one of the half-dozen or so performers incarnating the American folk singer, while in Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James, Pitt plays the assassinee. (Casey Affleck is the coward.)
Neither Blanchett nor Pitt were on hand to accept their awards.
Additionally, I'm Not There shared the Special Jury Prize (or runner-up for best film prize) with Abdel Kechiche's The Grain of Life, about a North African immigrant trying to make ends meet in a French fishing village. Kechiche's film had been tipped as the favorite to win the Golden Lion, as the two-and-a-half-hour drama had been greeted by rave reviews. One of the film's leads, actress Hafsia Herzi, was given the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best new performer.
The best screenplay prize went to the sole major British winner, It's a Free World…. (Joe Wright's much-admired Atonement, starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, and Vanessa Redgrave, was all but ignored when awards time came.)
Written by Paul Laverty, It's a Free World… depicts the exploitation of undocumented immigrant labor in London. Ken Loach, ever the socially-conscious filmmaker, directed.
Among the other winners were veteran Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, 67, who was given a standing ovation lasting more than 10 minutes, and Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, 62, both of whom received special Lions for their body of work.
Mikhalkov was represented at this year's festival with 12, a remake of Sidney Lumet's 1957 courtroom drama 12 Angry Men. In the new version, prejudice and bigotry rule when a Russian jury is asked to convict a Chechen youth for the murder of his stepfather. The film failed to win any awards.
Earlier in the week, American director Tim Burton, 49, had been another special award honoree.
This year's all-director jury was led by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou.
