To Venice International Film Festival. As with the other great cinema bashes, certain conventions must be observed to distinguish the veteran from the thuggish arriviste. Never carry your things in this year’s tote bag; a threadbare sack from the 2007 edition shows you’ve been in the trenches. Don’t get excited at the sight of celebrities. And avoid expressing enthusiasm (or the reverse) in terms of a film’s chances of winning the Golden Lion. We pretend we are above the crude transformation of culture into a competitive sport.
In reality, of course, that thought is to the front of every journalist’s mind. This year the ante-post favourites include Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. All very exciting. Good fun for amateur oddsmakers. But does winning the Golden Lion – or a rival prize at another big festival – really matter?
As so often in life, the answer is that it depends. The Golden Lion and, at Cannes, the Palme d’Or probably matter more than ever in the awards-industrial complex. Two of the only three films to win the Palme and the best-picture Oscar, Parasite and Anora, managed the feat in the past five years. When Lanthimos’s Poor Things took the Lion, two years ago, its status as an Oscar player was confirmed.
It is more edifying to look back at the masterpieces that had their status confirmed on the Lido. This is not to pretend that films such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour or Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon would have withered away if they had come only second, but the Lion becomes a useful part of the myth.
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You can see this in contemporaneous reports on two famous Irish wins at Venice: Neil Jordan’s, for Michael Collins, in 1996, and Peter Mullan’s, with The Magdelene Sisters, in 2002. The two stories can be viewed as stepping stones towards the current vibrancy of the Irish film industry. Both films found brewing controversies come to a head with the Lion win.
Michael Collins was already a phenomenon in Ireland by the time it arrived on the Lido. Everyone had a friend who’d worn vintage clothing for a day as an extra on the location shoot. Everyone already had an opinion on the casting of Alan Rickman, a regular Hollywood bad guy, in the role of Éamon de Valera. Looking back, one is reminded that, though The Irish Times had a website before the vast majority of newspapers, readers would almost certainly not have seen news of the Saturday-night win in this organ until Monday morning.
Paul Cullen was, on September 9th that year, already reporting on the political consequences as Jordan “made a triumphant return”. The story led with the director’s belief that decisions on the commercial release date would not be influenced “by concerns about its possible effect on the political situation in Northern Ireland”. Different times. Films were still seen to have vast cultural influence. Alluding to the activities of an earlier incarnation of the IRA was still seen as dangerous just months after the 1994 ceasefire had broken down.
Elsewhere in that day’s Irish Times, Michael Dwyer, the paper’s film correspondent, speculated on what impact the award might have on the studio that produced Michael Collins. To this date, mainstream Hollywood hadn’t bothered much with a festival that was seen as the preserve of independent directors and those who stubbornly persisted in making films not in English.
“For Warner Bros ... the Venice awards bring considerable respectability to a film which the studio has been notably nervous about releasing,” Dwyer wrote. He continued that the Lion would go some way to countering criticism “from commentators who had not seen the film”.
If anything the Lion brought even more attention to The Magdalene Laundries in 2002. That film about the abuse of single mothers in institutions run by the Catholic Church caused a fair amount of controversy in Ireland. But, as Patsy McGarry noted in The Irish Times, the furore was positively febrile in Italy. Cardinal Ersilio Tonini of Turin did not let his not having seen the film (see Dwyer’s wry comment above) temper his fury at north Italian neighbours. “It’s most disappointing that the Golden Lion has been awarded to a film that does not tell the truth about the Catholic Church,” he thundered. “We’re talking about an agenda here.”
They’ve done worse since. They gave the prize to Joker in 2019. I jest. I don’t mind that tart variation on superhero themes. Indeed, the anger from film purists at its win only proved that the really big awards at the really big festivals do still have purchase. Someone will make a small piece of history here in a week’s time.
