Never before has a festival reflected the phenomena of its time like this

There is probably only one woman's life more complicated to depict than Princess Diana's: that of Marilyn Monroe. More than twenty actresses have played her. And yet they have all fallen short of the image of myth. So far that no version is remembered. That changed on Thursday at the Venice Film Biennale. Radical.

“Blonde” has a vision. Not originally cinematic, but that of the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote a fictional biography of the idol twenty years ago. But the film by Andrew Dominik (and his producer Brad Pitt) picks up the method: It is a biography from within, which moves along the real career, but tells each station from the emotional household of the actress. Let's call it a mental close-up.

So what we see - from the seven-year-old child who is almost drowned in the bathtub by his mother who blames her daughter for her lover leaving her, to the evening that the world's most famous launch coincides with lying on the bed after a multiple overdose of sleeping pills - is a tour de force of emotions.

Certainly, all the facts and theories laid out in fifty printed biographies are there; Above all, male greed, be it the head of the studio who invites her into his office for sex, be it the photographers who stage her as an object, be it her second husband, a baseball star, who treats her as personal property.

The "highlight" is the meeting with John F. Kennedy. And not the "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" appearance is meant, but a meeting in the hotel room, where he belittles Marilyn like no man before.

Blonde isn't about her acting skills (which are controversial) or her literary prowess (feminists like to co-opt her) or her rebellion against the studio system (Fox paid her less than other stars).

All of this is touched upon, but Andrew Dominik always quickly cuts back to the condition of his subject. He is not interested in the star, but in the vulnerable girl who is constantly surprised at what life has in store for her – triumph and pain.

What Oates put on paper with changing perspectives, inner monologues and choral voices, Dominik translates into commentary shots, close-ups of Ana de Armas and impossible dialogues (several times Marilyn and her baby talk to each other in the womb) on the screen – sorry, on the screen, the film is slated for a non-theatrical release on Netflix on September 28, jeopardizing de Armas' significant Oscar chances as Monroe.

But "Blonde" was the exception in Venice. Should a historian ever ask himself what problems and debates were driving the world in 2022 – he would only have to open the program of this film biennial. Probably never before has a festival reflected the phenomena of its time as comprehensively as the 79th Venice Film Festival.

Everything is really there: the increasing drying up of Europe. The plea for a return to nuclear power in the face of energy shortages. The beginning of the queer movement. Women's struggle for equal rights, as early as the 11th century.

The conquest of one of the last male reserves by a chief conductor. The explosion of the Muslim banlieue in France into civil war. The tensions between first world and emerging countries. The beginning of the existential angst of the American middle class. The shifting of our life into artificial worlds.

Did we forget something? You name the crisis, I'll deliver the Venice film. One could almost believe that festival director Alberto Barbera had ticked off a checklist. Climate crisis: we have. Ukraine war: we have too. War Crimes Trials: Exists. Museums and their sponsors' blood money: Sure, we'll show.

Of course you can't do a festival like that. You have to take the films that are available. And they exist. The cinema (and the streamers), who only fell into shock in Corona, reacted. Who would have thought it possible that Oliver Stone would one day plead for peaceful nuclear energy as he did in "Nuclear"? Who would have thought that we would see Rome as a city dying of thirst like in Paolo Virzi's "Siccità"?

Gianni Amelio tells us in Il signore delle formiche that gays' public struggle for recognition did not begin in 1969 at the Stonewall protests in New York, but a year earlier at a trial of a professor in Rome.

Romain Gavras, the son of the legendary Costa-Gavras, imagines in “Athena” how right-wing extremists disguised as police officers set fire to France. In the Don DeLillo adaptation of White Noise, a small town in the United States gets its first idea of ​​an ecological disaster.

Not everything has worked. In "Tár", Cate Blanchett conducts the Berlin Philharmonic with a physical effort that would make even Kirill Petrenko pale, but loses herself in a pale story. "Freedom on Fire", which shows terrible destruction in Ukraine in two hours, seems more like a mobilization film for Western sympathies than as a reflection of what happened.

Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Bardo" finds breathtaking visual metaphors, but suffers from an intellectual self-pity of its main character, who cannot decide between his native Mexico and his adopted country the USA.

The two most beautiful films, however, were timeless, detached from our current affairs. One is about an 18-year-old girl (Taylor Russell) who runs away from home and joins up with a boy of the same age (Timothée Chalamet) on a odyssey across the United States.

The two are misfits and can't find a place for themselves anywhere like Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen did in Badlands, but their lot is even more hopeless because they know they'll never find one - they're cannibals. Luca Guadagnino's film is equally horrifying and romantic, one is frightened and yet sympathizes.

"Bones and All" has absolutely nothing to do with the Italo shockers from the 1970s, basically it's a coming-of-age story under aggravated circumstances: "Should it continue like this for 60 years," asks Taylor Russell once when she's back in change the place with great haste.

You can read all sorts of things into the film, but most likely it's about an existential desperation that hasn't just gripped nice cannibals these days. In Florian Zeller's "The Son", Hugh Jackman can neither understand the existential pain of his 16-year-old son, nor is he able to put it into words.

The film with the deepest repercussions was Koji Fukuda's Love Life. A young couple in Japan loses their young son in a tragic accident, but it is not primarily about the grief of the parents, but about a growing feeling of - let's call it - basic human loneliness.

The main characters' former partners reappear, all involved, it turns out, have been dumped or dumped multiple times, and the scars haven't healed. It's a film of quietly growing despair and, like the entire festival, it leaves you with rather scanty consolation.

P.S.: An innovation that cannot be praised highly enough needs to be mentioned and recommended. Sometimes an infrared point of light wanders through the dark hall and finally gets caught on a spectator. An usher walking up and down the edge with a laser pointer has once again spotted the faint glow of a mobile phone and sends a silent but clear message: Turn that thing off! She looks great here.