From death in Venice to Don’t Look Now, the city has been a melancholy and haunted place, but a preference for culture and socialization can trump this year’s genuine concern.
Last match September 10, 2020 17:14 BST
In 1912, led to Venice’s Lido, Thomas Mann wrote a story about the ruinous preference for a mysterious epidemic. Death in Venice spoke of narrow streets that reeked of disinfectant, tourists in danger on the seafront and a wonderful guy. of letters destroyed by his love for a child. Later, Luchino Visconti made a film: Dirk Bogarde in white suit and glasses prowling the Grand Hotel des Bains.
While Mann’s old hotel still exists, occupying a world-class plot, its glory days are far away. Array The plan was to turn it into luxury apartments, but the renovation is stagnant. Every time I have 20 minutes off, I caminando. se a corrugated iron fence, reduced windows with bars and closed green shutters. Hotel des Bains is made of mothballs. Maybe Venice deserves to be, too.
The 77th Venice Film Festival is a curious, concerned and suspicious affair, just a festive call. There are thermal chambers on each of the front and containers of hydroalcoholic gel for the hands next to each of the doors. By day, the position looks fabulous. Sand castle built opposite the tide line. At night, she adjusts her clothes and becomes a terrifying Gothic mask. Organized in defiance of covid-19, the mere presence of the occasion amounts to an ambitious act of faith, perhaps a fall into practice.
The manager of my hotel says they only bought the place last year, which 12 months has. Flooding booming in November and now this, the virus. Business is down 80 or 90%. He doesn’t know where he’s going from here. He doesn’t see how the town can be recovered. ” This position is a tragedy,” he says, shrugging.
Once again, away from the crowds, noise and glaciers, Venice has been the most melancholy and haunted place, a scene of disaster, personal or public, you can see it in Death in Venice, with its lost brilliance, or in Don’t by Nicolas Roeg Mira now, with its steps and voices that resonate. It’s a city of heat, rot and sudden rains. The promise of tragedy may be just your USP.
At least on the festival grounds, we are protected, with a strict policy of social estating rather than the old hustle and bustle. There are no gala dinners or parties at both screenings and must be booked online in advance. Masks are mandatory at all times, which means we constantly confuse strangers with friends and hold drowned conversations in a two-meter-wide buffer zone. Obviously, there’s a trick to look fashionable with a mask, just like both. Cate Blanchett, the president of the jury, puts on a pleated blue cape and looks like a Marvel superhero. I use the same thing and my look like an angry old lady who has to save from the burn unit.
What if he gets sick? It is a question that is whispered over and over again and it turns out that no one has a definitive answer. In the midst of a projection of the Italian drama Padrenostro, the lighting appliques of space are lit and a wave of panic passes through the rows of spectators, does it?Are they locking us up now? So far, the occasion seems to be going well, but it doesn’t take long to remind visitors what’s at stake. Every cough in the dark sounds like a shot. We’d like to replace the seats. , but that would break the rules.
On Monday morning, bring torrential rains. There are strong rays and winds. The large brutalist casino that serves as the site of the festival drips and water flows down the stairs to splash the ground. A woman slips on the steps, but we’re not allowed to. She says, “I think God is looking to tell us something. “
The rain has stopped, but thunder still rumbles as I cross the lagoon by boat to meet Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, who is sitting at a table in his hotel’s ballroom. Flower. This is Guadagnino’s third stopover in Venice since Italy finished its lockout in May. The film festival doesn’t scare him much. ” It’s perfectly organized,” he says, “so that’s the most important thing. The concept of creating a festival in those cases is smart, bright and simple; it is a question of not going back to the desire for a non-unusual theatrical experience; and it’s about using every means imaginable to make sure there’s no danger to the participants. And they did, they do, so congratulations. “
After our meeting, the publicist glances nervously at the darkening sky and says, “I think I have enough time to get back to the Lido before the typhoon starts. ” Unfortunately, you are wrong.
What are the elements that make up a smart film festival?Images, of course, provide the basis. But other people are its cornerstone: filmmakers and journalists, enthusiasts and staff. Normally, in such a vital event, all those other people are classified according to a strict hierarchy: the stars at the top, the rest of us there. This year is different, in that sense it’s getting better.
Perhaps Guadagnino is right: we are all social animals, we yearn for new experiences, new wisdom, and we aspire to percentage and talk about them with others. “It is a miracle to be here,” Blanchett said, “On the day of the inauguration, the outgoing director of Venice, Alberto Barbera, described the 77th edition as part of a noble enterprise, “a war for civilization and culture” in the midst of a crisis. It’s a pretty ambitious means of doing about an occasion that includes a fumeta comedy about a giant fly that robs banks. But unless disasters are overdue, the effects can simply verify this.
If so, we all win; we all take the right resolution in the future. If so, Venice delegates are not a bunch of inconsiderate idiots (what the Italians call Covidiotis) who ran too vigorously to be examined and were burned. These are other people who have adapted and cooperated, and who have taken the first cautious steps towards a dubious future, as almost each and every previous generation has done. Compromising positions have been part of the deal. The quest for happiness is to run within the limits of the world.
In Visconti’s Death in Venice, the hero is carefree and stupid and ends up finding a bad ending, staggering out of the Hotel des Bains, in search of beauty, something new to him. He’s attracted to a guy on the beach. He reaches out to claim it and dies on his lounger without delay. We expect a better result for this year’s Venice guests.