The 79th edition of the Venice Film Festival, running from August 31 to September 10, presents some of the most eagerly awaited movies of the year, including “White Noise,” “The Whale” and “Don’t Worry Darling.”
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest film festival in the world and one of the most prestigious. The Festival was organized for the first time in 1932, under the auspices of the President of the Biennale, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, the sculptor Antonio Maraini, and Luciano De Feo and obtained a great popularity, so as to become an annual event from 1935 onwards. Today it’s an important event that every year presents a selection of world-class films, bringing some of the most successful directors and actors of our time on the red carpet to the Lido di Venezia, and continuing the tradition of glamour, charm and intense competition. It is a benchmark of high artistic value and creativity.
Olivia Wilde, director and actor of “Don’t Worry Darling,” recalls visiting Palm Springs, the setting for the movie, twenty years ago, and being struck by the 1950’s architecture, the desert atmosphere and the glamourous homes of iconic stars like Frank Sinatra. But much like the film she has now directed, it also felt weird. Every time she looked out the car window, she thought, “If we settled Mars, this is what it would look like.”
“It felt like the ultimate expression of man’s dominance and power” she says. “It’s so beautiful, but it’s also a really strange place. If not for all the creature comforts that man has created, you would die very quickly out here. And it’s the desert, so it’s spooky. I recall thinking that someday we have to make a horror movie out there.” Now she has fulfilled her dream. The movie is about a 1950s housewife living with her husband in a utopian experimental community who begins to worry that his glamorous company may be hiding some disturbing secrets. As it turns out, she’s right. The other part of Wilde’s dream involves the Venice Film Festival. “We had several studios and streamers who wanted to make this film and I sat down with all of them and I said, ‘The path that I see leads us to Venice.’”
Olivia Wilde appreciates the impeccable pedigree of the Festival. “To me, a Venice film is a film that really embraces everything that is ambitious and romantic and beautiful about cinema.” The sleek psychological thriller, starring Florence Pugh and Harry Styles as a picture-perfect couple in an experimental postwar community, will have its world debut out of competition on Sept. 5.
Styles, Pugh and Wilde are only a few of the stars expected to dazzle the public and critics outside of the lavish Hotel Excelsior and walk the red carpet at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi. Their presence, alongside lifetime achievement recipient Catherine Deneuve, Hugh Jackman, Tilda Swinton, Penelope Cruz, Timothée Chalamet and many others, helps transform the Lido, the lowkey beach town across the Venetian Lagoon from St. Mark’s Square, into a setting of glamour, fantasy and aspiration for the duration of the festival.
This year’s edition is loaded with highly anticipated films and performances in the main competition slate: Ana de Armas, a Latina actress whose casting as Marilyn Monroe has created so much controversy, is making her debut in Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde”. Brendan Fraser’s turn in Darren Aronofsky’s new film “The Whale” is already being hailed as an awards-worthy comeback; and Cate Blanchett is playing a renowned leading female orchestra conductor.
White Noise, a dark comedy written and directed by Noah Baumbach, is adapted from the 1985 novel of the same name by Don DeLillo and will open the first night. It is Baumbach’s eleventh narrative feature film and the first not to be based on an original story of his own. The film stars Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy, André Benjamin, Alessandro Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Don Cheadle. Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies at The-College-on-the-Hill, husband to Babette, and father to four children/stepchildren, is torn asunder by “the Airborne Toxic Event”, a cataclysmic train accident that casts chemical waste over his town.
This is a movie that has been long in development. In 2004 Barry Sonnenfeld was set to direct the film adaptation of White Noise, in 2016, Uri Singer acquired the rights to the book and pushed the project into development, in 2016, Michael Almereyda was set to write and direct the film adaptation, and finally in 2021, it was revealed that Noah Baumbach would be adapting the film for Netflix with Baumbach producing with David Heyman and Uri Singer. It will be interesting to see if the movie lives up to the postmodern DeLillo masterpiece and if so, how the audience receives it.
Other titles to watch for: “The Whale,” starring Brendan Fraser as an obese man attempting to reconnect with his teenage daughter. Alejandro González Iñárritu, who scored back-to-back best-director wins for “The Revenant” and “Birdman,” is returning to Venice with the mystical drama “Bardo.” And after director Florian Zeller pushed Anthony Hopkins to a best-actor win for “The Father,” pundits will be eager to take the measure of Hugh Jackman in Zeller’s latest family drama, “The Son.”
