The 2022 Venice film festival, or Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia is now well under way, with this year’s iteration boasting five Italian films in the running for the Golden Lion.
Two highly anticipated titles of the Bel Paese’s 2022 contenders have already premiered at the festival, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All and Emanuele Crialese’s L’Immensita, both of which feature huge Hollywood names in their leading roles and are said to tell deeply emotional stories.
Bones and All, starring teen idol and it-boy of art cinema Timothée Chalamet, has been described as a cannibal love story, wherein love blooms between two listless youths on the fringes of society as they embark on a 3,000-mile journey through the back roads of America. The film, which sees Chalamet and director Guadanigno collaboratively reuniting for the first time since 2017’s queer coming of age Call Me by Your Name, is already being critically lauded, receiving a five star review in the Guardian and currently sitting at a near perfect score of 95% on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.
Ahead of the film’s premiere, Chalamet, 26, said the Palermo-born 51-year-old Guadagnino had been “like a father” to him since the two made the Oscar winning adaptation of André Aciman’s novel five years ago.
“The collapse of society is in the air,” the New York native went on, saying “I think this film can shed light on this theme too.”
Chalamet plays Lee, a young cannibal who flees his family and eventually meets up with kindred spirit Maren (Taylor Russell), an 18-year-old on the run for the same reason.
Guadagnino, Chalamet and Russell arriving at the festival. (Photo: AAP)
“Together, they try out the possibility of living the impossible,” said Guadagnino who has previously made four films with the legendary Tilda Swinton, including A Bigger Splash and a remake of the Dario Argento classic giallo film Suspiria.
Chalamet added: “It’s a heart-rending, tragic, very strong love story”.
When asked if love saves all, the star replied, undoubtedly disappointing millions of doting fans, “I’m still much too young for love”.
Emanuele Crialese described his Venice competition film L’immensità, starring Spaniard and Hollywood icon Penélope Cruz as “a story that very closely concerns me, it is my story told in a poetic key.”
The film is a 1970s Rome-set turbulent family drama, in which a 12-year-old trans child struggles to navigate their gender identity; their mother battling mental health demons all the while.
“It would be reductive to call it my ‘coming out’ film”, Crialese said, speaking on the film’s autobiographical subject matter, “the public might think of it as a film about transition, but that is not the case at all.”
The director, who said recently that he has in fact “always been out” as a transgender man – “I’m not a rock star, what should people care” – thus doesn’t want the film to be pigeonholed in this way.
Cruz and Crialese walk the red carpet at L’immensità's Venice premiere. (Photo: AAP)
The film is rather as much the story of the director’s pain and confusion, as it is his mother’s.
“My mother did not know where to hit her head, she hid with me just as it happens in the film, she tried to protect me, but I suffered from the pain I gave her. Until later in my life, when I was able to change the a to the e (in the director’s dead name) and leave a piece of my body behind, I navigated these conditions.”
“Today,” Crialese added, “there is a different society than the one I grew up in, but we need to support families and not leave them alone as my mother was at the time.”
He said that “the Rome of the film is an abstract, metaphysical landscape.” For Crialese, who “loves big, open landscapes”, shooting an entire family drama inside of a house as some may have expected him to “seemed impossible.”
Still of Cruz and actor Luana Giuliani in L’immensità. (Photo: ANSA)
Reviews are already praising Cruz’s performance as a beautifully wounded housewife, a cinematic archetype richly portrayed by the glamorous icons of the era in which Crialese came of age, and in which he chose to set this film.
The Venice premieres of Italian directors still to come over the festival’s remaining days are Gianni Amelio’s Il Signore delle Formiche, Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Chiara and Andrea Pallaoro’s Monica.
