This time next week I’ll be packing my bags for Venice, where the 80th edition of its annual film festival will unveil new films by Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Yorgos Lanthimos, David Fincher, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Bradley Cooper, the late William Friedkin – an especially glistening lineup for an event never short on gloss. But even without such attractions, Venice would remain my favourite festival: it’s the faintly unreal allure of the city itself, the spray from the Vaporetto as you leave the airport, the sense that you’re arriving into an eternal film location rather than just an industry event.
You can’t arrive on the Lido, the drowsy barrier island where the festival unfolds, and not recall the yearning melancholy and faded finery of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice – that the Grand Hotel des Bains, where Dirk Bogarde’s wilting composer Gustav von Aschenbach saw out his days, has been unoccupied since 2010 underlines the isle’s ghostly air of glamour. Although Visconti’s film is set in summer, you’d be forgiven for remembering otherwise. It’s Nicolas Roeg’s devasted, desolately wintry Don’t Look Now (ITVX), of course, that best captures Venice in its off-season. Its misty, depopulated maze of alleys and canals laden with threat match the mindset of Donald Sutherland’s grief-stricken parent.
More commonly, Venice in its heaving, sun-soaked prime is one of cinema’s go-to spots for swooning tourist romance. I wrote only a few months ago in this column about how David Lean’s full-hearted, gardenia-scented Summertime (Pluto) may be the greatest of these; two decades earlier, a distinctly Hollywood-soundstage vision of the city (rendering Venetian bridges and gondolas in gloriously fake art deco curves) served as the backdrop to my favourite Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical, Top Hat (free on BBC iPlayer).
The Bridge of Sighs is the destination for two lovestruck 13-year-olds – one American, one French, both in thrall to cockamamie lore – in the hyper-precious but rather winning family romp A Little Romance; while hopping between a Venice vacation and rockier domestic life in Venice, California, the on-off adult lovers of Paul Mazursky’s jagged romantic comedy Blume in Love are scarcely more mature.
Venice has rarely looked more rapturous and shimmery than it does in Iain Softley’s superb film of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, the saturated beauty of the locale standing in stark contrast to the cuttingly anti-romantic machinations of Helena Bonham Carter’s Kate Croy. Perhaps the city isn’t as kind to Englishwomen abroad: in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, a dreamy, taffeta-gowned Venetian getaway for the filmmaker’s alter ego Julie presages a tragic end to her relationship with dissolute civil servant Anthony.
The 16th-century escapades of Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco, a proto-feminist advocate who was charged with witchcraft, are given broadly enjoyable treatment in Dangerous Beauty, a 1998 costume drama that got lost in the shuffle at the time. (The terrible title can’t have helped.) It merits a revisit, not least for its sumptuous set-dressing and Catherine McCormack’s lively lead turn.
Staying in a historical vein, Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays have a mixed screen legacy: Othello has been much-filmed, though rarely with much Venetian vividness – Orson Welles’s towering 1951 interpretation owes much of its atmosphere to Morocco – while The Merchant of Venice has Michael Radford’s rather stuffy, Al Pacino-led version (Library Kingdom Cooperation, via Dailymotion), though it certainly looks handsome. Still, historical Venice has never been more ravishingly imagined, albeit as pure fantasy, than in Powell and Pressburger’s delicious film of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (ITVX).
There are, oddly, few such devoted valentines to the city from Italian film-makers, and fewer still available to stream. (You’ll just have to dig up a DVD of Silvio Soldini’s Bread and Tulips, Italy’s own Venetian-set answer to Shirley Valentine.) But a lovely exception is Andrea Segre’s underseen Shun Li and the Poet, a study of the relationship between a Chinese cafe worker (the wonderful Zhao Tao) and a Slavic fisherman, in the less picturesque lagoon commune of Chioggia. The delicate watercolour visuals, capturing the season’s constant rainfall, prove Venice’s magic is hard to thwart on screen.
All titles are available to rent on multiple platforms unless otherwise specified
Also new on streaming and DVD
No Hard Feelings
(Sony)
The teen sex comedy, a genre that’s rather gone out of fashion in recent years, makes a kinder, gentler return in this tale of a gawky virgin (Andrew Barth Feldman) shown the ropes of modern dating by Jennifer Lawrence’s thirtysomething deadbeat. It’s short on outright belly laughs but Lawrence is wonderful, throwing herself into the farce with physical abandon and exposed feeling.
The Future Tense
(Mubi)
Long based in Britain, ever-interesting Irish film-makers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy consider their relationship to their homeland in this insightful, idiosyncratic documentary, probing the vast chasms in culture and history spanned by a comparatively small body of water, and its impact on their lives as artists and parents.
