…which is located at Via Palatino 16 in northwest Milan. I taxied over there as soon as soon as I hit town around 2:30 pm. I dropped off the suitcase and scooted on over.
The house seems much larger in actuality than it does in this 1968spiritualtranscendencefilm. Plus the front facade has been torn up and re-windowed or whatever. Very little reverence for the past.
Terrence Stamp “does” every member of an upper-class Milanese family (Silvano Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky, that freckly red-haired kid), and, having touched divinity or something that feels holy, they all become unhinged in this or that way. All except Laura Betti’s maid, who transforms into a kind of levitating Madonna.
Anyway the house is largely blocked from view, and you can’t see the backyard at all. But I was there, dammit. I smelled it, felt it. My hands touched the iron gate.
To-the-manor-born Luchino Visconti (Senso, RoccoandHisBrothers, The Leopard, TheDamned, DeathinVenice) lived a flush, bucks-up life from cradle to grave
His primary residence was Villa La Colombaia on the island of Ischia. He also chilled at Villa Erba, a 19th Century estate near Lake Como. His third residence, I’ve been told, was a swanky pad in Rome. Last but not least was Castello di Grazzano di Visconti, a medieval abode south of Piecenza, restored over a century ago by his father, Duke Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone.
HE visited the latter yesterday afternoon. Open to the public three days a week. Every single aspect of this magnificent storied environment reduced me to awed silence. I could feel the presence of hugely pissed-off ghosts. The life-sized statues, half-soiled by the passage of time, did it especially.
I honestly didn’t feel all that much while watching Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s NAZA, which recently won the Silver Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival. Now I feel sympathy, at least, over Abraham and Szor grappling with alossofIsraelicitizenship, which isn’t so much over the content of the film (although this is certainly a factor) as much as the duo having won the festival’s second prize.
I’m chilling in rural Italy as we speak, attempting to settle into “il dolce far niente“, or the art of doing nothing for a while. Tomorrow I’ll be visiting the Visconti Castle of Cherasco in the Piedmont section of northern Italy. I’ll be training to Zurich on Wednesday, and then flying to Madrid for an overnight stay, and then back to JFK on Thursday.
May el-Toukhy‘s Woman Unknown won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion trophy purely because of gender. Jury chairperson Maggie Gyllenhaal had complained about a “systemic problem” resulting in only two female directors being in the running for the Golden Lion, and so she wanted to push back against this. The other jurors went along.
Word around the campfire inferred that Woman Unknown was a compromise choice, the jury having deadlocked over Lee Chang-dong‘s Possible Love and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor‘s NAZA, which has been way, WAY over-praised.
Jordan Ruimy earlier today: “To say I Play Rocky blew the roof off the Princess of Wales theatre last night would be an understatement. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Toronto audience — any festival audience — embrace a movie the way they did last night. The crowd applauded multiple times during the film. I really think Amazon/MGM has their Best Picture contender here. And yes, the reviews will not all be kind — there are already a few pans (TheWrap, Screen, The Daily Beast). Some critics have not forgotten about Green Book, and will sharpen the knives for Farrelly again. That’s a given, and beside the point. The people will love this movie, and it might win the top prize at TIFF next Sunday.”
There is really only one prevailing subject when it comes female-directed, festival-angled dramas these days. Whether contemporary or historical, that subject is “life is / was miserable for women due to coarse, creepy, entitled and oppressive men who routinely use, abuse, suppress and generally darken their lives.” Movies that say men are thoughtless, oppressive dicks, plain and simple. They do almost nothing but inject fear and anguish into the women concerned, not to mention feelings of entrapment, stagnation, futility.
May el-Toukhy‘s Woman Unknown, a grade-A, carefully wrought, relentlessly grim period drama that won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion trophy last night, is one such film.
It will gloom you out and then some, but is incontestably a class presentation. Five minutes in I was muttering to myself, “Okay, I see…the subdued mood and obvious high-end craft is why it ranks high with the jurors”…very well acted, especially by Mathilde Arcel, who took the Best Actress Volpi Cup at the closing ceremony…authentic mid 1940s atmosphere…nicely shadowed cinematography by Jasper Spanning.
But it’s a male-oppression drama that immediately suggests that there’s no way out of the tunnel. And that just about sums up Woman Unknown. It’s relentlessly grim but then this is life in the big city (i.e., Copenhagen) for Arcel’s Marie, who serves as nanny to the daughter of a 50ish rich guy but is also engaged to the rich guy and fucks him whenever the mood (his) strikes. The complication has to do with Marie’s sexual past with a German soldier, and wanting to keep this history totally buttoned up as Danish resistance guys would publicly humiliate her if this came out. A younger guy, the coldly predatory Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard), wants to fuck Marie, and so is threatening to blow the lid off unless she consents, etc.
El-Toukhy’s aim is to draw you into Marie’s world, and that means constant sexual predation and subjugation and even, in one of the grossest scenes of physical intimacy in movie history, the swallowing of a huge gob of male spit (i.e., the guy being the coldly predatory Karl, played by Thorbjørn Hedegaard). There’s no way out of this, no lucky escape, no sudden dramatic solution…Marie is stuck and so are we. The grimness is what it is.
Alas, Woman Unknown screws up toward the end when it ignores a signal to wrap things up. I was saying to myself “this really needs to end now but El-Toukhy is determined to keep it going a while longer. And then a while more. This is a mistake…a narrative that’s leaving us hanging.”
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, THR‘s Scott Feinberg, APNews’ Jake Coyle, Variety‘s award-season lapdog Clayton Davis and many others…last night’s TIFF screening of Peter Farrelly‘s I Play Rocky at the Princess of Wales theatre has yielded seemingly universal approval from every Tom, Dick and Harry (except for Chase “hose in mouth” Hutchinson).
I called this just over two weeks ago in an 8.29 piece titled “Possible ‘Odyssey‘ KilleronOscarFront.” The article was totally ridiculed by the HE Nolanoids. But maybe not so much now…right, dickheads?
As of today there is finally a basis for hope in the quest to find a film that can stop The Oydssey in the Best Picture race.
I’ve spoken to an intelligent guy who recently saw and is genuinely, profoundly impressed with Peter Farrelly‘s I Play Rocky (Amazon MGM, 11.6). HE’s tipster is a sensible, savvy adult who knows what’s what as far as a certain sector of industry is concerned. He gets around and knows people, and he believes that the over-45s are not fans of The Odyssey. They simply don’t like it that much.
And while it’s early yet they’re almost dying to vote for a modest, little-engine-that-could film that actually connects on an emotional level.
This is what I Play Rocky does, he says. It’s not some boilerplate, middle-range, “this is how a famous hit movie happened” docudrama, but one that’s exceptionally well shaped, nicely sculpted and impressively acted (especially Anthony Ippolito‘s turn as Sylvester Stallone and AnnaSophia Robb as Sasha Czack, Sly’s wife) and so on — a film with real feeling.
Did the savvy guy came close to feeling a bit choked up a couple of times? He says he did, yes.
This is it, boys and girls…a way to stop The Odyssey. Not just with anti-Oydssey fervor, which is out there in ample supply, but by honestly preferring the charms of a smallish, seat-of-the-pants, unpretentious, straight-shooting film that older Academy members (along with Joe and Jane Popcorn) might want to embrace instead of rotely following the lead of the robotic Nolanoids and mindlessly fellating a joyless Chris Nolan film.
The battle cry is no longer “Odyssey haters unite!” It is now “let the love for I Play Rocky wash over our community like bottled spring water and thereby cleanse ourselves of the Nolanoid psychology, which everyone is vaguely annoyed by anyway. Nobody wanted to support this fucking film in the first place. Not really.”
I’m not saying TheWrap‘s Chase Hutchinson is a card-carrying Nolanoid, but if his 7.15.26 review of The Odyssey is any indication he sure sounds like one. It seems reasonable, therefore, that his just-posted pan of I Play Rocky will be echoed by the Nolanoid community. And don’t kid yourselves — the Nolanoids are legion.
Make no mistake — the Oscar season battle between I Play Rocky vs. The Odyssey will be a bloody, bruising fight to the death.
The Hutchinson cabal will be lobbing M79 grenades at Peter Farrelly‘s film like James Cagney lobbed grenades at the Germans in The Fighting 69th. Because they know it’s a potential Odyssey killer in terms of snagging (or failing to snag) the Best Picture Oscar.
“I wanna take the future. I wanna win. And you don’t get there by being some ‘aw shucks’ nice guy sap. There’s no place in the Oscar race for people like that. Oscar campaigning is war. It’s dog eat dog, rat eat rat. If Chase Hutchinson were drowning, I’d walk over and put a hose right in his mouth.” — The Founder‘s Michael Keaton if he decided to become an award-season handicapper.
The distinguished, much-admired producer Jeremy Thomas, whose name was synonymous with cinematic edge, daring and sophistication over the last 40 years and who shepherded several Bernardo Bertolucci films from inceptipn to theatrical release, has died in London.
A long battle with cancer, I’m told. The sad news began to circulate late last night, but I was too lazy to post about his departure right away. Thomas was 77 years old.
I was just hanging with Thomas a few days ago by way of Luca Guadagnino‘s Joie de Vivre. (He’s a significant talking head during Part Two.)
Thomas’s finest producing credits include The Shout, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, The Hit, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, Crash, the great Sexy Beast, The Dreamers, David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method, and Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive. There were many, many others.
Thomas returned to London two weeks ago after spending a month in Los Angeles, saying goodbye to close friends.
Source: “Jeremy was in Los Angeles for an experimental treatment for the cancer that he seemed to have beaten, following surgery five years ago.”
