Each day during the 2024 Venice Film Festival, IndieWire will update this article with a review of the day’s screenings, activities, and buzz.
Day One
Cinema isn’t dead, long live cinema! (Pronounced cheenima.)
So the Venice Film Festival — aka La Biennale as it’s known around the Lido — launched into its 81st edition on Wednesday, August 28 with a chatty day of press conferences, a world premiere, and a Golden Lion ceremony for an American screen icon. And it’s an especially hot day with temperatures in the low 30 degrees Celsius (or the upper 80s in Fahrenheit; I’m trying to get into my Italian spin here) and attendees in under-air-conditioned venues like the Sala Grande schvitzing into the night. Heads up: Bring a paper fan.
Last year’s Venice saw a festival deprived of top-drawer talent due to the then-ongoing writers and actors strikes. That’s not the case in 2024, where all the stars of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Warner Bros., September 6) could come out for their world premiere, not just Tim Burton and his girlfriend Monica Bellucci (who plays the soul-sucking succubus villainess in the sequel to the 1988 cult classic) but Michael Keaton, Jenna Ortega (whose fanfaring public wailed en masse when she hit the red carpet outside the Sala Grande), Catherine O’Hara, Willem Dafoe, and Justin Theroux as well.
Plus, Venice perennials like Cate Blanchett — who stars in the out-of-competition television series premiere “Disclaimer,” bowing Thursday and from director Alfonso Cuarón — showed up on the carpet along with jury president Isabelle Huppert and her filmmaker-heavy contingent of competition deciders. Apparently, an alleged feud between Huppert and director James Gray dating back to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival is no more: The pair sat next to each other during the opening ceremony. It’s longstanding arthouse movie nerd lore that Gray and Huppert butted heads while on the jury she led that awarded her close collaborator Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” the Palme d’Or.
Earlier in the day, on a jury panel with Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera and alongside jury presidents from the other sections, including “Leave No Trace” director Debra Granik on the Horizons jury, filmmakers expressed concern over the weakening state of cinema. “I’m worried about the things everyone is worried about: Making sure that cinema continues to live because it is very weak now,” said Huppert. This year’s Venice main competition includes 21 world premieres from directors including Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar, and Pablo Larraín. And oh, lucky day for him, as his Angelina Jolie-starrer “Maria” just sold to Netflix, who will now have two Best Actress contenders on the company’s hands along with “Emilia Perez” Cannes winner Karla Sofía Gascón, who just got a splashy profile in the New York Times.
“We understand that the generations combined in this room need [the Venice Film Festival] to continue telling the stories that aren’t covered in the mainstream… Festivals are now maybe festivals of defiance,” Granik said. “Going against the grain. This festival has 80 years of solidity and mobility. It doesn’t get old, and you don’t get stale.” Is cinema becoming a rarified thing of the past that now only thrives in the bubble of a film festival? That’s the question on more than a few minds.
During the opening ceremony, Sigourney Weaver received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, accompanied by a clip show of her best work, from “get away from her, you bitch!” in “Aliens” (and recently recycled to dulling effect in “Romulus”) to her satin-draped seductress in “Ghostbusters.” The visibly nervous and humbled Weaver, reading from a printed-out speech, thanked Barbera and his team for this “jet fuel of encouragement” in the form of the Golden Lion statuette. She joked that maybe she was too tall for Hollywood to ever put her in a box.
Later that night, Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” got a healthy but hardly fawning three-minute (or was it four-minute?) standing ovation in the Sala Grande. The macabre afterlife comedy, which finds Burton returning to mischief-making form thanks to crafty creature makeup and practical effects, played only just OK in the room from my vantage point — the dark laughs didn’t always land, especially as the movie tries to update its ’80s sensibility with a contemporary perspective, often frankensteining and exquisite-corpsing tropes from the original (like the shrunken heads populating the underworld, or the sand monster in the original’s eerie desert wrong-turn of a netherworld of the damned) but with a little touch-up. These standing ovations are arbitrary, anyway, often dependent on how long cast and crew linger in the theater for applause and under nerve-damaging levels of stage lights.
Stay tuned for more out of the 2024 Venice Film Festival tomorrow when “Maria” makes its world premiere, bringing Angelina Jolie to the Lido and just a few days before her ex (but not ex-husband!) Brad Pitt makes his way here via water taxi for the premiere of “Wolfs.” He’s also an executive producer on “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” but was a no-show tonight.
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