For all the unpredictability of this unsettling 2020, one could at least be certain of one aspect of Venice Cinema Biennale’s official selection long before its disclosure — namely, the abundance of female filmmakers in the main line-up.

One of the top three film festivals worldwide, Venice has often been questioned in recent times for giving comparatively far less space to women than Cannes and Berlin. In response, artistic director Alberto Barbera used to unconvincingly explain that, “There were not so many films by female filmmakers to pick from in the first place.”

In the meantime, however, he must have realised that turning a blind eye to the current zeitgeist cannot really be an option for a festival of such significance.

Hence, this 77th edition of the Mostra featured no less than seven women in the main competition — plus Malgorzata Szumowska’s flawed, ineffective Never Gonna Snow Again, co-directed with Michal Englert. Actually, Kornel Munduczo’s Pieces of a Woman too is sometimes credited as having been co-directed by scriptwriter Kata Wéber. Earning a well-deserved Best Actress award for Vanessa Kirby, this is an interesting and eccentric variation on Netflix aesthetics, i.e. a traditional if partly autobiographical drama about a woman failing to give birth to her baby, and facing the ensuing trauma in a courageously contrasting way from her family. It is enriched by a handful of unusually long scenes, effectively creating tension through the kind of extended ‘real-time’ one would expect from live TV.

Unlike the past, when the Venice Film Festival gave comparatively far less space to women filmmakers, the 77th edition of the Mostra featured no less than seven of them in the main competition. A round-up of the notable films that were on offer...

Similarly recalling (poor quality) television — rather than cinema — is Nomadland by Chloe Zhao, on the impoverished working class living in trailers across America. Too busy looking for the silver lining of a social phenomenon that frankly has none, through postcard-y landscapes and Frances McDormand’s skillfully contrived human warmth, Nomadland ends up losing sight of the seriousness of its topic. No analysis whatsoever is offered, just some unimaginative and fatalistic consolation of the ‘these are the times we live in, we can’t change them, so we better like them’ variety.

It won an overrated Golden Lion to be sure, but also one that would hopefully encourage American productions to attend the Venice Lido again starting from next year — something the festival is desperate for after Covid-19 commanded an almost total embargo this time round.

Thankfully, some of these female filmmakers were there for the quality of their films, and not because the festival just had to invite plenty of them no matter what. For instance Les Amants by Nicole Garcia, showcased French directorial elegance at its best, or the festival’s two genuine feminist masterpieces.

The World to Come by Mona Fastvold is a lesbian quasi-sexless love story between the wives of two farmers in mid-19th century, when the United States was beginning to take shape: partly “indie” and partly Hollywood mainstream, The World to Come faultlessly dissects a nascent patriarchal society, never in a simplistic and coldly judgmental fashion, but always with outstanding human and visual sensibility.

The other masterpiece, Mama, is a stunning Chinese debut, presented in one of the sidebars. Autobiographically recounting the death of her mother in the early 1990s, director Li Dongmei shows a rural environment halfway between tradition and modernity, pleasantly placid and yet suffocating, integrating women in its vital cogs and yet allowing no space to who they are. Her style is discreetly unobtrusive, meticulous, ultra-subtle, remarkably attuned to the rhythms of daily life and ready to capture the tiny symptoms of an unspoken malaise troubling its characters.

It is somewhat fitting that Mama premiered in a festival awarding a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Ann Hui, one of the heroines of China’s contemporary female filmmaking. Thirty-six years after her Love in a Fallen City — written by 20th century queen of Shanghai/ Hong Kong’s literary sophistication, Eileen Chang — Hui adapts for the screen the first published story by the same writer. It offers the umpteenth version of the Dangerous Liaisons archetype, the eternal cruel battle between the innocence of youth and the shrewd, manipulative disenchantment of adulthood.

Dynamism is the key word here: sprawling in dozens of directions at the same time, Love After Love draws a richly nuanced tapestry, never in a stiff and bookish fashion, but always in motion, painstakingly following each and every imperceptible change in the characters’ souls as their ever-lively portrayals increasingly occupy center stage. Of course ‘instability’ is the other key word; the instability of feelings mirroring Hong Kong, that most unstable and dynamic of post-colonial countries, caught here in one of its many turbulent periods (the pre-war days).

This is how truly political films are made: not by way of confused and grossly simplistic pamphlets (such as Miss Marx by Susanna Nicchiarelli, on the German philosopher’s rebel daughter, or Julia von Heinz’s Und morgen die ganze Welt, on so-called right-wing populism), but obliquely, by exploiting the resources of seemingly unrelated and non-political fiction.

Wife Of A Spy by Kurosawa Kiyoshi might seem a blandly conventional World War II spy-movie, but look at it closer and, through the splendid visual geometries whereby the story is staged (and which got Kurosawa a Silver Lion for Best Director), a meditation on Japan’s historical/geopolitical identity will appear, a simple one, but one that is worthy of several comprehensive tomes.

Another daring meditation on history, memory and identity is Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! (Special Jury Prize), tackling a highly controversial 1962 factory strike in the Rostov Oblast area, which the army repressed in a bloodbath. Since it’s Russia, things are, of course, immensely complicated. But being the masterful storyteller he is, Konchalovsky manages to disentangle everything with composure, through perfectly balanced black-and-white compositions, in a crystal-clear fashion — particularly when it comes to the supremely intricate relationships between the party, the army and the KGB.

Given that not many other countries are as wildly contradictory as Russia, Konchalovsky’s storytelling is, at the same time, lucidly logical and utterly paradoxical: the most normal character is also completely schizophrenic, as she shares the people’s disillusionment toward the regime but at the same time is nostalgic for Stalin. The film looks at her with critical distance and objectivity for most of the film, before segueing unexpectedly to make the viewer identify with her emotionally, and wrapping up with the most deliberately improbable of happy endings.

If there is one constant feature in Russian history, so Konchalovsky seems to tell us, it is a very particular mixture of deep faith and deep disillusionment vis-à-vis the authorities, which leaders and power groups are ready to abusively exploit in all historical circumstances. And only a paradoxical way of storytelling such as Konchalovsky’s can aptly illustrate this paradoxical history.

There is no politics in Notturno by Gianfranco Rosi (Golden Lion back in 2013, and Berlin winner in 2016), and surprisingly so, since it is set in the typically hyper-politicised Middle East, across (among others) Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Kurdistan. Rosi chooses to place his documentary a million miles away from the litany of media’s constant stream of information.

With hardly any dialogues, Rosi’s gorgeously shot and edited images aspire to be poetry, rather than the content we consume every day in the news. Notturno’s Middle East could just as well be South Africa, Yucatan or any other number of places: for the most part it looks like a non-place with no geographical markers, even more so some remote planet with scarcely any human presence at all. It is a land that comes across as post-war, post-catastrophe, post-human, post-everything.

In other words, Rosi tries to catch the fleeting epiphanies of beauty that can arise, against all odds, once a world has been ravaged by almost complete destruction. The result, with all its in-your-face artistry against the background of ‘so-troubled-an-area’, can be charming as well as irritating: more than ever, it truly depends on the viewer’s disposition here.

After last year’s triumph (Saim Sadiq’s winning the Best Short), Pakistan was unrepresented in this Mostra. The subcontinent as a whole could only count on two Indian films, both going against the grain of this festival’s strong emphasis on the female gender, by way of two decidedly male-oriented films.

One, in the main competition, The Disciple by Chaitanya Tamhane, is the intriguingly unusual and touching portrayal of a practitioner and scholar of Indian classical music, dedicating his entire life to it with something akin to a quiet but almost religious dedication.

The other, Milestone, revolves around a middle-aged Punjabi truck driver left to painfully pick up the pieces of his life after his wife’s suicide. Director Ivan Ayr is perhaps the prisoner of his own self-imposed patterns (the script is sometimes too schematic; the camera is sometimes too consistently glued to the lead, etc.), but ultimately they enable him to attain a certain dramatic intensity quite a few times.

Milestone was part of the “Orizzonti” sidebar, which was much better than it has been over the past few years. Indeed, sidebars have probably been the highlight of this festival, whereas the main competition was less daring than one could hope for — particularly in a year like this, with a number of festivals not happening and thus leaving Venice a lot of leeway.

Whatever the post-Covid world will be, it is hoped that the Cinema Biennale will regain not only its capacity to select good films, but also to put them under a proper spotlight in the main section.

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 27th, 2020