The Venice Film Festival is one of the biggest film events of the year, the bridge to the fall film season and an event that showcases future award winners, top ten films and beloved classics. It’s also a remarkably diverse event in terms of cinematic profiles, with films like “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and “Joker: Folie a Deux” playing alongside restorations of classic films, 3.5-hour dramas and original documentaries. This roundup of three 2024 Venice releases has a little bit of everything, including a near-future drama about the surveillance generation, a quasi-documentary that’s one of the winkiest musical films ever made and a gentle end-of-life drama.
The best of the three is Neo Sora’s feature-length fiction debut, which follows closely in the footsteps of his acclaimed documentary about his father, “Ryuichi Sakamato: Opus.” He demonstrates an incredibly assured vision, photographing his young performers in Tokyo against a backdrop of concrete roads and buildings in a way that is both mesmerizing and slightly terrifying. This is a generation that has grown up in a world of increased control, and Sora’s script deftly traces two people heading in different directions under that oppressive system, one toward obedience, the other toward rebellion.
“happy end” The film opens with a captivating, theme-defining sequence, in which high school students Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka) sneak into a club to see one of their favorite DJs. As the police raid the establishment, the DJ continues to play as the crowd heads for the exits… except for Kou. He stays in the same spot, enjoying the beats. He’s not ready to give up yet.
Sora's drama is set against a backdrop of political unrest in Tokyo, which is essentially reflected on a micro level at Yuta and Kou's high school. A prank played on their principal leads to a controversial new surveillance system that not only monitors students, but also gives them demerits when they do something wrong. As the students begin to fight back against Big Brother, these young people are forced to make decisions about what they care about and how much they are willing to fight for it.
At one point, Yuta tells Kou, “We’re all going to die while you just merrily carry on,” to which he replies, “If we’re going to die, let’s have fun.” There really is a turning point in life when a young person decides whether they’re going to follow the rules or keep dancing to the DJ’s beat, and Sora’s excellent drama captures this crossroads beautifully, never descending into melodrama but understanding that the stakes for these people are huge, the kind of decisions that can define future happiness.
Similar to “Rolling Thunder Revue” or “I'm Still Here,” Alex Ross Perry's song “Pavements” It’s a challenging manipulation of the very form of the musical bio-documentary, which is a good thing. Personally, the traditional bio-documentary, comprised of anecdotes, usually ordered chronologically, is slowly driving me crazy. So the realization early in “Pavements” that Perry was trying to capture a left-of-center band with a very left-of-center film caught my attention. I’m not sure the bit doesn’t get tired in this incredibly long (over two hours) film, but I absolutely admire everyone’s commitment to it.
The story goes that instead of a documentarian, Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus wanted to hire a screenwriter, “but he didn't want a script.” Perry, the director of “Her Smell” and Pavement's “Harness Your Hopes” video, took up that challenge in a big Their “Pavements” has some elements of a music documentary, including archival footage contrasted with more recent clips from the band’s reunion tours, but it also includes some things that are, well, different. There’s a bit of analysis of the construction of a pop-up museum about the band, but what’s really perplexing is the creation of two Pavement products: a jukebox musical called Tilted! Delighted with Zoe Lister-Jones and Michael Esper and a traditional biopic called “Range Life” starring Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger and Jason Schwartzman. Everyone involved in both projects takes them and the band very seriously, and the stage musical even played in New York in 2022 to mixed reviews. The images in the fake film sometimes look like parodies of films like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but often present them in a serious light, too.
Much of “Pavements” is a nod to the very idea of making a movie about a band, which is undeniably ambitious, but also a little irritating in its self-awareness at times. Still, it’s good enough that eternal pessimist Malkmus will probably hate it.
By Sarah Friedland “Family touch” The film opens with a tender and heartbreaking scene. The great H. Jon Benjamin (Bob Belcher and Sterling Archer, among a hundred other voices) brings his mother Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) to an assisted living facility for her increasingly dangerous dementia. Ruth doesn't even realize he's her son, and at first thinks they're going on a date together. When she's told the truth, you can see the heartbreaking confusion in Chalfant's eyes.
Friedland’s film speaks to the cruelty of dementia, but also how people with it often find things to hold on to that feel familiar. Ruth doesn’t remember her son, but she does know exactly how to make borscht. A scene where she basically takes over the kitchen at the institution is fantastic, fraught with tension because we know the depth of her condition, but also tangible and warm at the same time.
Ruth is more drawn to the home’s staff than to the residents — not in the traditional sense of “cinematic denial,” but in one that feels true and character-driven. She befriends two of the home’s workers (Carolyn Michelle and Andy McQueen), and there’s a tense moment leading to an escape attempt — but “Familiar Touch” is a quiet, character-driven film that finds its strength as much in a soundscape as Ruth floats in a pool as in dialogue. Words have, after all, betrayed Ruth, having lost much of their meaning due to a terrible illness. What Friedland understands deeply is the power of the unsaid, how memories can be tied to sound and smell and touch, too — and how sometimes these are the last to go.