At Venice Film Festival, Trapped Women and Controlling Men

The press room on the Venice Film Festival must be essentially the most stunning movie pageant press room on the earth. Taking over the third flooring of the imposing Palazzo del Casinò, the principle atrium is a gargantuan, triple-height house carpeted in smooth cream, with columns clad in marble extending up previous Murano glass chandeliers, and floor-to-ceiling home windows hung with gold-sheened drapes giving approach to a glowing blue sea. On a transparent day — which it virtually all the time is — you think about that, had been it not for the curvature of the earth, you possibly can see eternally. Or at the least to Croatia.

It is an everlasting contradiction that this lofty house needs to be peopled with dozens of perspiring journalists hunched over their laptops, hammering away at their keyboards like birds beating their wings towards the bars of a very gilded cage. Or perhaps such darkish ideas in a such a light-filled construction — designed by the architect Eugenio Miozzi in 1938 to embody the monumentalist fantasy of Mussolini’s fascist regime — are a symptom of a pageant lineup that, this 12 months, encompasses a profusion of tales about girls equally chafing towards the restrictive, however typically luxurious, enclosures constructed by controlling males.

Some of those males had been towering real-life figures. Penélope Cruz turns within the standout efficiency in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” because the long-suffering spouse of the Italian motoring magnate (Adam Driver), and Carey Mulligan does a lot the identical as Leonard Bernstein’s spouse Felicia in “Maestro,” directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. In each these circumstances — and arguably to the detriment of each well-made however unusually evanescent movies — the portrayal of genius pales compared to the portrait of a lady who supported and nurtured that genius, even when it threatened to engulf her.

Of two memorable scenes in “Maestro,” just one — Bernstein’s efficiency of Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony” at Ely Cathedral in 1973 — is about his music. The different is a lacerating home argument within the couple’s bed room, throughout which, in each shaking nerve, Mulligan embodies the resentment of a shiny, bold girl whose devotion to and indulgence of her well-known partner has price her a lot of herself.

The life-draining capability of selfish males is much more strikingly literalized in Pablo Larraín’s mordant, monochrome “El Conde,” wherein the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is recreated as a 250-year-old vampire. In Larraín’s scabrous, grisly alternate historical past, Pinochet is a decrepit immortal, drowning in self-pity since faking his loss of life to evade justice. And Pinochet’s spouse Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer) is imagined as his equal, and even his higher, in sheer perversity; a lot of the distress the terrorized nation skilled below the dictator is usually recommended to have been at her behest.

But though that offers Lucía, who continuously petitions her husband to chunk her in order that she can also stay out her depravities eternally, a level of obvious company, that’s robbed from her in a single transient scene the place “The Count,” as he likes to be referred to as, casually trades her off to his obsequious Renfield-style butler (Alfredo Castro). The Count is then free to pursue an affair with a nun, together with fantasy play that includes her dressing up as Marie Antoinette. (The Count has been obsessive about the ill-fated Queen of France ever since, in one of many movie’s most provocatively ugly early scenes, he licked the guillotine blade that severed her slender neck.)

Marie Antoinette is maybe the last word emblem of ornamental married womanhood. And after all, she was the title star of a earlier movie from Sofia Coppola, whose Venice-competing “Priscilla” is one more story of a lady’s tentatively self-engineered escape from the affect of a dominant man.

Based on, and clearly in deep sympathy with, Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me,” the movie follows the well-known couple’s relationship, from their first assembly when then-Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) was simply 14 years outdated and dwelling on a U.S. Army base in Germany, to the second, virtually a decade-and-a-half later, when Priscilla Presley drove via the gates of Graceland for the final time as the home’s mistress.

This is unmistakably a Sofia Coppola film, in its luxuriant really feel for materials and facades, however as in “Marie Antoinette,” right here the surfaces develop into the substance. It is a narrative about how, particularly to a naïve teenager, the trimmings of an outwardly tantalizing lifestyle may be sprung upon you want a lure.

During their first tearful goodbye in Germany, Elvis (Jacob Elordi) makes the schoolgirl Priscilla promise to “stay exactly the way you are.” But the banner movie investigating the icky need on the a part of some males to maintain their womenfolk infantilized is Yorgos Lanthimos’ joyously macabre “Poor Things.” The greatest hit of Venice thus far, it’s deeply — if twistedly, and sometimes hilariously — involved with the thought of feminine emancipation, as Bella, performed by a riveting, ingenious and extremely bodily Emma Stone, shucks off the psychological bondage first of her adoptive father (Willem Dafoe) after which of her caddish, pompous lover (Mark Ruffalo).

Even the movie’s hyperreal aesthetic, wherein Lisbon and London are depicted by intricate, steampunky set-builds with lurid pc generated skies and seas, reinforce the idea: The movie’s self-consciously airless and synthetic universe makes the vigor of Bella’s adventures in intercourse and self-discovery all of the extra hanging.

There are nonetheless extra girls trapped below the thumbs of domineering males dotted all through the lineup, most notably in two black comedies that each characteristic contract killers (one other characteristic of Venice 2023, should you additionally take David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” and the Liam Neeson thriller “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” into additional account).

Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” stars and is co-written by Glen Powell, who deserves to leap as much as major-league stardom on the again of this effervescently amoral exaggeration of a real-life story: Gary, a diffident English professor who moonlights as a faux hit man, finds love getting in the best way of his mission when an abused spouse, Madison (Adria Arjona), tries to enlist his providers. She is pushed to it as a method to flee. But the murder-solicitation in Woody Allen’s French-language “Coup de Chance,” is way much less morally defensible, prompted by jealousy and once more, a lack of management, because the possessive rich-guy Jean (Melvil Poupaud), discovers that his younger, vivacious spouse (Lou De Laâge) has taken a lover.

“Coup de Chance” is, in some respects a return to type for Allen, even when one suspects that a few of its breeziness is right down to the engaging solid compensating for the staleness of Allen’s current English-language quippery by mercifully talking in French. (Native French audio system of my acquaintance inform me that the dialogue, to their ears, sounds equally unnatural.)

But it does really feel extra present than most of Allen’s current output, not least in the way it syncs up neatly with this Venice version’s chief preoccupations: hit males and trapped girls, and all of the poor issues who discover themselves in plush Central Park or central Paris flats, in press room palaces or fantastical Lisbon resorts, surrounded by luxurious, however longing to be free.