In the end, it didn’t matter that much that many of the big names stayed away. Those who did come to Venice, including Adam Driver, Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola – some thanks to interim agreements with the US writers’ and actors’ guilds – overwhelmingly stated their support for the Hollywood strikes that have cast a critical spotlight on film business practices. And after a sluggish start, there was a rich crop of major films that made you glad to be on the Lido. So Venice retains its claim to be a formidable A-list festival – yet not a truly international one. The makeup of this year’s competition was emphatically American and European, except for one film from Japan, one from Chile and one from a Mexican director – Michel Franco’s Memory, yet to screen at time of writing – but with a North American cast headed by Jessica Chastain.
Still, even with its mainstream slant, the Venice selection had vigour. The competition wasn’t exactly brimming with experimental invention, but then we did have Yorgos Lanthimos’s much-awaited Poor Things, the Greek director’s most joyously outre work yet. Based on Alasdair Gray’s novel, it’s a Victorian fantasy about a young woman (Emma Stone) reanimated by a Frankenstein-like surgeon (a juicily eccentric Willem Dafoe). With a child’s fast-developing brain and the body and libido of a mature woman, she embarks on a voyage of discovery with a swaggering roué (played by Mark Ruffalo with an insanely variable English-bounder accent). Lanthimos and his team devise some hallucinatory visuals (the heroine’s costumes alone, by Holly Waddington, are beyond delirium), and Stone gives a wild, witty and audacious performance that is sheer delight.
