Jornal da Mostra
Nº 360 > 28ª Mostra > 12/09/2005
Subscribe here the 'Jornal da Mostra'
VENICE 2005 CHOICE OF THE JURY AWARDS FESTIVAL PRIZES TO FILMS INSPIRED IN ASIA
The jury of the 62nd Venice Film Festival awarded the main prize, The Golden Lion, to Ang Lee, a film maker today renowned in Hollywood Productions, but from Taiwan in origin and inspiration. The Festival thus acknowledged a selection with a prevalence of Asian films. Ang Lee brought Venice a disconcerting, sad film - Brokeback Mountain, a simplified drama defined as western gay - a record of homophobia in the U.S. in the sixties, when two cowboys live and, at the same time, dissemble passion over the course of 20 long-suffering years.The prize awarded to Brokeback Mountain for Best Film, reverted expectations for a top prize for Good Night, and Good Luck, the film preferred by both public and critics, in reports, over the course of the festival. But George Clooney's splendid film against McCarthism and pro freedom of the press, won at least one of the expected awards: a prize to the extraordinary actor David Strathairn, as anchorman Edward R. Murrow, who challenges the abuses of the ultra-right Joseph McCarthy in the fifties, on television. Good Night and Good Luck was also awarded the prize for best script written by Grant Heslov and George Clooney.
Most evident in both these films is the compulsive behavior of the characters and others in the pleasure they derive from smoking. In recreating a period in time, the American cinema finds a formula for again catering to subliminar publicity for the tobacco industry. To show chain smokers on a film set in the decades when smoking in public, unabashed was at its height in cinema, is not censurable.
Les Amants Réguliers, a film by Frenchman Philippe Garrel, on youngsters in 1969, with syndromes of abstinence of the rebellions of 1968, with a showing announced on Italian television for the day following the awards, took a Silver Lion for the directing. The film is being shown on television before it is shown in the cinemas and carried away the prize for Best Technical Contribution, for William Lubtchansky's photography.
The Special Prize from the Jury went to Mary, an opportunist pasticcio on mysticism and religion by U.S. film maker Abel Ferrara. Ferrara's multifacet style resorts to all of the success literature popular today on the mysteries of Christianity and Magdalen. The film applies metalanguage, an end to a film on religion when the disturbed actress gives up her career to wander aimlessly through the holy sites of Christianity, among Jews and Arabs in everlasting conflict.
Less as a consolation prize and more for merit, the prize for best actress went to Italian Giovanna Mezzogiorno. She dedicated her Coppa Volpi to her spiritual father Peter Brooke, who initiated her in theater. Mezzogiorno is in the beautiful Italian film La Bestia nel Cuore, by Cristina Comencini on the drama of affective separation.
The lukewarm ceremonies for the awards were aggravated by the anticlimax generated by the cold, unemotional welcome on the part of the audience, given to Stefania Sandrelli, awarded a Golden Lion for her career. Not even her daughter Amanda's tears as she handed her mother the trophy, brought any thrill to the ceremony. Equally bureaucratic was the reception given to French actress Isabelle Huppert, habitual prize-winner that she is at Venice prize givings. A special prize was devised 'for her extraordinary contribution to cinema'. Nor was the film for which she was at the 62nd Venice Film Festival - Gabrielle, by Patrice Chéreau - even cited.
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, found inspiration in a novel by renowned John le Carré. He was one of the most applauded at the Festival sessions with a U.K. production The Constant Gardner and was awarded the Prize for Youth the day before, for his provocative theme in a film at the pace of a thriller, speaking out against pharmaceutical laboratories and the diplomatic contribution to insensitive atrocity.
Another outstanding award - parallel - went to Argentine Master Fernando Solanas for his cutting documentary La Dignidad de los Nadies - Cittá di Roma Prize and Prize from the Association of Italian Documentarists.
