2023-09-07 09:56:16
But there are laughs elsewhere in The Palace, because the film, in fact, has enormous raw material for great satire. These sick women in search of eternal beauty haunt their surgeons at the luxury hotel. The old millionaire with his young wife. There are even some very good ideas, like those Russian oligarchs who watched on TV Yeltsin’s resignation and Putin’s seizure of power. There, the film takes on its most political and witty look. For more than 20 years we have laughed at the rich Russians, and now we regret the consequences. There are few actors in this movie who know how to make us laugh at rich savages, like John Cleese, who manages to elicit laughter with a single gesture in one of the funniest scenes in the film.
But, in the end, what remains is the feeling that Polanski did not realize that the world had changed, that what was funny 30 years ago had become an empty echo. That joke regarding oral sex in exchange for a diamond necklace is no longer funny; The foul-smelling dog poop no longer hits its supposed target; Joking regarding Russian models having sex with rich older gentlemen is no longer a big deal. Or, at least, such attempts at satire don’t work when everything else in the movie is going nowhere. Perhaps that is why the film is set at the end of 1999, a world and time in which “The Palace” might have been funnier.
A few days ago, the specialized magazine “The Hollywood Reporter” published an article in which it asked how journalists should deal with the Venice-Polanski relationship. ignored? Controversy? Indeed, the answer is almost unnecessary with The Palace, because the film proves that there is an ulterior motive behind Barbera’s frequent calls to his “artist friend.” The real question to be asked should be: What does such slapstick comedy do in such a serious festival? This is a film that amounts to cinematic suicide, writing a bad ending for an artist who was once great.
A “stroke of luck” .. a farewell return?
A different reception and a different proposal came with Woody Allen’s new movie, “A Stroke of Fortune”. Allen’s last films weren’t up to the mark. “Rainy Day in New York” (2019), with Timothée Chalamet and Selena Gomez, wasn’t too bad, but “Rifkin Festival” (2020), shot at the San Sebastian Film Festival, was a comedy flop and a real misstep from a filmmaker who previously presented a handful of classics. considered cinema.
Is “Stroke of Luck” a return to his best moments as a director? Sometimes, yes. It’s a comedy of mystery and suspense that owes much to his film Matchpoint (2005), with Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, as the themes are the same: luck, fate, sin and betrayal. In the new movie, a man tracks down his attractive wife because he suspects she is having an affair with another man. And if self-imitation is the method, as Alfred Hitchcock once said, no one can blame Allen for retracing his steps.
Reactions and responses began at the film’s premiere, as the hall erupted in applause as soon as Allen’s name appeared on the screen in the opening sequences, and applause erupted at the end as well.
Fanny (Le de Laage) is the heroine of this French-speaking film, shot in and around the French capital, Paris (because of the allegations once morest the director, he might not finance the film in America). One morning she meets Alan (Nils Schneider), a former high school classmate. Alan soon tells her that he secretly loved her at school. He’s in Paris because he’s writing a book, and they arrange to meet once more.
Fanny, who works at an auction house, is married to Jane (Melville Bobo). It is not clear how he became a millionaire, but Fanny knows that her husband “makes the rich richer”. Is Fanny fed up with her husband? Do you want another life? Why does she agree to go to lunch, get a rose, and make love to her former classmate? Tired of Jan’s jealousy, and see a new opportunity with Alan?
A Stroke of Fortune is not a revolutionary work of art, but it testifies to Allen’s uncompromised ability to tell stories economically, to paint settings and environments from just a few shots and to properly direct his actors. It is a comic mystery, and it will include a murder (we cannot reveal the identity of the murdered), and from that moment the film begins to develop. It becomes richer and deeper, intrigues and intrigues, and puts us alongside one of the central characters in the film. In the end, he achieves a kind of poetic justice, thanks to chance, which Allen believes plays an important role in our lives.
Vittorio Storaro, the great Apocalypse Now cinematographer, is the only name – along with Letty Aronson, the film’s producer and the director’s younger sister – among regular Allen collaborators to appear in the film.
The accusations of sexual assault by his daughter Dylan Farrow (he was acquitted twice of guilt) had kept any American producer from financing Woody Allen’s projects in America. A stroke of luck is the 50th movie in his artistic career, and it is likely to be his last.
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