At the Venice Film Festival, Dirty Politics, Eco-Warriors and a Mother's Quest.
Comme toujours, l'article du New York Times est le plus explicatif, le mieux informé, le meilleur résumé. En voici les grandes lignes :
The mainspring of the action is the sudden collapse of an old apartment block in the center of Naples, which sends people in the streets around it fleeing in terror. In an age before special effects, the director had only one crack at this scene, and he shot it simultaneously with several cameras to astonishing effect.
By RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS
Comme toujours, l'article du New York Times est le plus explicatif, le mieux informé, le meilleur résumé. En voici les grandes lignes :
VENICE — Fifty years ago, Francesco Rosi’s “Le mani sulla città” (Hands
Over the City) won the Golden Lion at the film festival here. A new
digital version — made by the Italian National Cinema archive from the
original negative and two good prints — was screened this year in the
“Venice Classics” sidebar category.
 | |
| A still from Francesco Rosi's "Le mani sulla città." The film won the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion 50 years ago |
The mainspring of the action is the sudden collapse of an old apartment block in the center of Naples, which sends people in the streets around it fleeing in terror. In an age before special effects, the director had only one crack at this scene, and he shot it simultaneously with several cameras to astonishing effect.
The collapse, causing death and injury, is the result of unregulated
building next door by a property speculator and local councilor, Edoardo
Nottola, who routinely buys votes and doles out favors to maintain his
position. The ensuing public outcry and the opposition’s eloquent
attacks in the City Council threaten the administration’s previously
unassailable position in imminent local elections, and Nottola’s
unbridled career as Naples’s biggest developer looks to be at an end.
What follows is a tense political drama as Nottola fights for survival,
finally switching parties and even managing to become head of the
planning department in a new administration.
Francesco Rosi daringly cast Rod Steiger as Edoardo Nottola, and the
film is a unique combination of drama in the style of an American noir
film — with a thunderously melodramatic score by Piero Piccioni — and
contemporary newsreel and television reporting. The direction and the
performances from a big cast are pitch perfect throughout, and Steiger,
as the antihero who comes to dominate both the narrative and, it seems,
the whole city, puts in one of the most dazzling performances of his
career.
In the unruly scenes in Naples’s council chamber — reconstructed for the
film at Cinecittà in Rome — in which Nottola defeats his enemies
through a mixture of personal charisma and intensive backroom
machinations, two thousand years seem to melt away as we witness a
modern version of the last days of the Roman Republic and the imposition
of imperial rule.
Nottola’s triumph means that he can divert huge sums of central
government funds into his own coffers — a prophetic fictional vision of
the kleptocratic systems that came to be operated by Italy’s Christian
Democracy party and its Socialist allies, which finally imploded with
the “mani pulite,” or clean hands, scandals of the early 1990s.
[...]
[...]
Dealing with another form of unquestioning adherence to a cause that can
have cruel consequences for the lives of others, Stephen Frears’s “Philomena,”
also screened in competition, was a hit with the news media as well as
the public. It is based on Martin Sixsmith’s 2009 best seller “The Lost
Child of Philomena Lee.”
In 2002 the director Peter Mullan won the Golden Lion for “The Magdalene Sisters,”
which brought to the big screen the appalling story of generations of
young unmarried Irish Catholic women who were sent to convents when they
became pregnant. They were subsequently pressured into giving up their
children for adoption and were obliged to spend years working in
laundries as punishment for their alleged sins.
Philomena Lee was one such woman, who gave birth to a son in a convent
in Ireland in the 1950s. The boy was adopted by a couple from the United
States and the bereft mother spent decades trying to trace him, only to
come up against a wall of obstruction and hair-raising mendacity from
the Catholic Church. Mr. Sixsmith, a former BBC political journalist who
later lost his job as a communications director in Tony Blair’s
administration, finding himself at loose ends, took up Ms. Lee’s story
as a journalistic project and arranged to go to the United States with
her in search of the long-lost child.
“Philomena,” the cinematic version of the story, takes the form of a
road movie in which Judi Dench stars as the unsophisticated Irishwoman
who has retained her religious faith, and Steve Coogan (who also wrote
the script with Jeff Pope) as the jaded, soft-left metropolitan
journalist, Martin, who has long since lost his.
The running conflict between them about matters of faith provides a rich
vein of humor and poignancy through the film, and the consistently
entertaining script has some serious points to make as a tabloid
“human-interest story” begins to look more like a revealing piece of
investigative reporting. The casting of the quintessentially English,
middle-class Ms. Dench will no doubt contribute to the movie’s
well-deserved commercial success, but she is not always entirely
convincing in this part.By RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS
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