Jornal da Mostra
Nº 355 > 28ª Mostra > 02/09/2005
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Venice 2005 - Martial arts, freedom of expression, 'Invisible children', and war trauma on the inaugural scene for the Venice film festival
Martial arts, banned in China in the seventeenth century make the film Seven Swords, by Tsui Hark, a Hong Kong production selected by self-declared China-phil Marco Muller, festival director, for the inaugural session of the 62nd Venice Film Festival. More than a philosophical confrontation between good and evil, Seven Swords is a nostalgic choreographic game reminiscent of the legendary Australian film Mad Max, with fantastic suits of armor and make up. Only this time, somewhat affected by gags from popular Chinese cinema, with characters full of mannerisms, lost in the long narrative of the saga of resistance and of a cult to this remote Chu Ch'i-chen culture in Manchuria set in 1660. The production expects the film to be a success and ends with the possibility there may be more to come. We shall see.The first film in the Venice competition was the U.S. Good Night and Good Luck, directed and played by virtuoso George Clooney - an author's film in the American sense with flaws characteristic of an empire. The director assumes that every spectator on the planet is familiar with the history of the United States of America. A viewer intending to watch an action film motivated by the name Clooney must first resort to the internet and the history of MacCarthyism: without this information, he may feel he has lost out.
Clooney speaks out on behalf of freedom of expression in the early days of television when anchor Edward R. Murrow and his brave team of journalists decide to stand up to Republican senator Joseph Raymond MacCarthy, a sensationalistic heel who took advantage of the fear lived by Americans of the Cold War to denounce any communists who might have worked their way into any sector of communication, mainly Hollywood, all of which rendered him much in evidence. The journalist took this stand much to the amazement of all, responsible as he was for his program "See It Now", a weekly CBS news program. As was the case with television in 1953, all of Clooney's film is in splendid black and white...The result is an excellent film that is more than merely nostalgic - a film on courage. MacCarthyism is, after all, in practice once more in the U.S. today.
A production in the making for over four years has finally been finished for the Venice Festival - the very sad All the Invisible Children, directed by Algerian Mehdi Charef, Yugoslavian Emir Kusturica, American Spike Lee, Brazilian Kátia Lund, Englishmen Jordan and Ridley Scott, Italian Veneruso, and Chinese director John Woo from Hong Kong. All of the directors broach the subject of lost childhood or how children become corrupted by an environment that exerts influence on them or, in which they must survive. Cheref takes children in an African civil war, where not even barbarie of the worst kind seems able to do away with the childhood dreams of a small mercenary soldier. Kusturica ventures into a juvenile reformatory where a small gipsy is about to be set free. His father is waiting for him outside so he will go back to stealing. Scotts, daughter and father, focus on regression to childhood of a traumatized war photographer. Lund, co-director of the revolutionary film City of God, follows along with one day in the struggle for survival of two children in the streets of São Paulo. Veneruso does the same with two young boys, thieves in Naples. Woo leaps from one abyss to another between two Chinese little girls, one extremely rich and the other abandoned and out in the streets.
Finally, The Secret Life of Words, by Catalan Isabel Coixet. War trauma in Yugoslavia, remorse over the past, lead a mysterious young woman to change her identity and take refuge as a nurse on an oil platform on the high seas. A film to be respected as was the previous film by the same director, Mi Vida Sin Mi, an original narrative on loss and death from cancer.
