2023 Venice Film Festival Trends: Hitmen and Horny Gals

This year’s Venice Film Festival, sapped as it was of movie stars and glamor, had a slightly uncanny feeling. The selfie-seekers outside the Sala Grande, usually clamoring for the likes of Joaquin Phoenix or Lady Gaga, were instead falling over themselves to take photos with, for example, jury president Damien Chazelle, who looked baffled when I saw him yanked into a random cell phone frame as he left the opening night presentation. The press conferences were occasionally perfectly ludicrous — Caleb Landry Jones did the Dogman one with a Scottish accent — but mostly dry; the parties, few and far between and empty of celebrity hijinks, couldn’t even excite the tourist who sat across from me at lunch one day and described the gala she’d just attended as “nothing special.” In one screening I sat next to a man who held an unlit wooden pipe in his mouth the entire time.

Fortunately, many of the movies were great — Poor Things, The Green Border, Hit Man, Ferrari, and Priscilla stood out, among others — and a lot of them seemed to be in incidental conversation with each other, repeating themes and ideas that hint at a roiling collective unconscious obsessed by performed masculinity, killing people for money, abject horniness, and Willem Dafoe. Below, I outline the oft-Freudian fixations of the 80th Venice Film Festival’s hive mind.

This year’s festival featured three separate films about men hired to murder people for money. Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft is an 80-minute infrared something (not a movie, as Korine insists and our critic Bilge Ebiri perfectly elucidates in his review) about a Floridian contract killer (Jordi Mollà) who repeats over and over again that he is the “world’s greatest assassin,” though it’s not quite clear what sort of innovative murder techniques he’s invented that earn him this honorific. Mostly he just mopes around, pitying himself and ignoring his wife, who twerks listlessly on their bed while moaning about how lonely she is. I would be thinking harder about this movie than Korine did if I tried to determine whether he’s sending up video game tropes or just paying them some weird homage here.

But I loved Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a stealth rom-com about a philosophy professor who moonlights as a fake hitman for the New Orleans Police Department. Glen Powell has never been more charming than he is as the unassuming Gary Johnson, who creates various hitman-like characters — one that’s a Patrick Bateman type, another who reminded me of a Tilda Swinton character — in order to catch would-be killers. Along the way, he falls for one of his “marks” (Adria Arjona) and the movie becomes a rollickingly clever, What’s-Up-Doc–esque romantic comedy of errors.

Lastly, there’s David Fincher’s The Killer, starring Michael Fassbender as a private-industry contract killer who does yoga, wears bucket hats, smashes a lot of iPhones, and talks to himself a lot. Like Aggro Dr1ft, the movie’s script is purposefully repetitive; we hear Fassbender explain his approach to life — “Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability,” etc. — over and over again while making cringe-inducingly derivative observations on the world around him. “New York,” he says. “The city that never sleeps.” Oh?? This one also features a nearly wordless girlfriend who gets caught up in the fray of being a hitman’s wordless girlfriend. I think Linklater’s movie is the only one that gives the love interest an actual name.

Movie-wise, Linklater, by a trillion miles. Forced to choose one hitman from the three to hire, I would have to go with Michael Fassbender because his hitman is slightly less annoying than Jordi Molla’s.

It really does boggle the mind to attend Western European film festivals that proudly and joyfully premiere films by men who have been accused of raping women and children, and then listen to the festival’s directors not only defend the choice but present it as an act of benevolent political open-mindedness, the sort that flies bravely in the face of lame American prudishness. It would be one thing if these movies were masterpieces or at least kind of good, but the movies are always absolute garbage. Is the idea just to raise a middle finger to “cancel culture,” an imaginary concept that regardless seems to really irritate the Europeans and which they ascribe almost entirely to Americans? (Yes.) (Though one person I spoke to suggested I look into the directors’ Italian mob connections, which I have not yet had time to do, but please email me if you are in the Italian mob and have somehow forced the Venice Film Festival to premiere all of these movies.)

The offerings this time around: Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance, a movie about a dissatisfied rich French woman having an affair with a high-school peer that feels like it was written by a bot that took all of Woody Allen’s scripts, translated them into French, translated them back into English, then translated them back into French again for some reason. The characters neither speak nor act like any alive person I’ve ever met or heard about, but I suppose it’s possible that the people in Woody Allen’s personal illuminati do explain their personalities out loud to one another. Here, the main character’s husband says several times, “I make my own luck,” while her lover repeatedly stresses how much he believes in luck and chance. The protagonist also says over and over again how much she hates hunting, despite growing up in a hunting family. Isn’t that hilarious? You would think she’d love hunting, but no, she hates it … You get the idea, and if you don’t, Woody Allen will explain it 40 more times in the same exact way, don’t worry.

Roman Polanski’s The Palace was even more wrenchingly tedious, an alleged comedy about a fancy hotel and its inhabitants and employees scrambling to put together a party on the eve of Y2K that currently sits at 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Watching this movie made me wonder if I would ever experience anything as funny ever again or if its facile, deadened, randomly racist tone would seep into my bloodstream and alter me forever. Some moments mined for comedy include a dog pooping out caviar, Russians being thuggish gangsters, Scandinavian men being sissies, Mickey Rourke being himself, American women being money-hungry, and Muslim women daring to exist in the public sphere. The response to The Palace here was so dire that the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera spoke out defending the movie and criticizing reviewers for treating Polanski with a lack of “respect.” He did admit that he told Polanski the film was “not completely resolved,” an incredible conversation to imagine and the only comedic thing about this entire film.

I didn’t get a chance to catch Luc Besson’s Dogman because probably nobody involved wanted me to, but Jessica Kiang’s review is a deliciously brilliant takedown of the movie, in which Jones stars as an abused, wheelchair-bound man who is obsessed with having too many dogs and also cross-dressing. She describes the movie as “numbskulled nonsense …bludgeoningly obvious, creatively inert, deathly dull.” This is, to the word, exactly how I would describe the movies above, so again — what the fuck are we even doing here?

Forced at Jordi Molla’s sadboy gunpoint to choose a film from the two I saw, I’d go with Coup de Chance, which is awful but did not leave me with the suspicion that art itself as we know it is dead and humanity is beyond salvation.

Thank God that Willem Dafoe willemed his way into three different movies at Venice. Every time I saw his warm, crinkly face I breathed a sigh of relief: Here was a man on a screen who would not try to kill me or insinuate that I was being a Pilgrim. In Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, that face is cut to shreds and sewn back together into a strange, beast-like mask, so that he can play a morally conflicted mad scientist who creates, loves, and loses his creation, the reanimated Victorian woman Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). In Finalement L’alba, an Italian period piece about a gaudy Hollywood production filming in Rome in the 1950s, he plays a sweet assistant-cum-driver to Lily James’s haughty mid-century starlet, later acting as a sort of narrator/translator for the film’s protagonist, a wide-eyed young Italian girl (Rebecca Antonaci) who auditions as an extra and ends up having a Babylon–esque night with her favorite movie stars. And in Olmo Schnabel’s debut film Pet Shop Days, Dafoe is a dirtbag New York City upper-middle-class dad, cheating on his cancer-ridden wife and trying to defend himself to his teenage kids, drinking alone and fucking his daughter’s tutor. The man’s got range!

Poor Things is a masterpiece, and Dafoe plays a large part in that; he should get a Best Supporting Actor nomination for this one.

The girlies at Venice this year are horny, and they don’t care who knows it! First up we have Emma Stone in Poor Things, who discovers masturbation, realizes nobody at home is going to help her achieve orgasm, and thusly goes on the lam, insatiably fucking her way across Europe. “Why don’t people do this all the time?” she asks her lover, played by Mark Ruffalo. In Priscilla, there’s a tragic element to the sexual desire: When she finally comes of age, all Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) wants to do is bone Elvis (relatable). But he’s only interested in her as a vessel of purity and virginity and refuses her for years. Fortunately, near the end of the film, we see her flirting with her karate instructor, suggesting that she’ll get the sex life she deserves when she finally leaves her husband. In The Beast, Léa Seydoux is so desperate to bone George MacKay across all manner of time, space, and cinematic genres that she’ll even fantasize about him when he’s in his 2014 incel phase.

All of these horny queens deserve our appreciation, but Emma Stone’s performance is probably the best I’ve seen at Venice this year.

Don’t you dare call these biopics “biopics.” They’re not! “Biopics to me are linear and shown on the History Channel, so they’re documentaries, and I’m not interested in that at all,” Michael Mann said of his Enzo Ferrari biopic, Ferrari. Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro is “a love story.” Okay?? El Conde is about the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, but he is a vampire — not a biopic. Priscilla is … actually, Sofia Coppola has not said anything about anyone calling it a biopic, even though the film only shows one small portion of Presley’s life, so it actually isn’t really a biopic. But you probably can call it a biopic if you want, Sofia seems fine with that.

Out of the four, the best biopic that isn’t a biopic but is sort of a biopic is Priscilla.

Only five women were given competition slots at Venice; the other 16 were given to male directors. Coincidentally, there sure were a lot of movies about hypermasculine dudes at Venice this year. Specifically, the hypermascs were mostly (1) older,( 2) white, (3) moody as fuck because they were (4) making some perceived personal sacrifice in the name of war/cars/money. Three movies were about men in naval crises, and one was about Mads Mikkelsen setting out to tame and conquer the Danish heath. In Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Enzo Ferrari cheats very calmly and regularly on his wife, mourns his dead child, and tries to figure out if he should recognize his mistress’s son as his own. He spends most of the movie storming around Italy in a bad mood because he has to do all of this while making very fast cars that sometimes kill people. The movie briefly flirts with upending the idea that The Cars Were Worth it, that maybe men and their reckless toys do not quite earn the brutal human cost they require, but then at the end it’s like … no, actually, the cars were worth it.

Many of the Venice films featured a man Making a Big Choice, usually about a problem they invented themselves — in Coup de Chance, for example, a rich financier ponders putting a hit (see: first trend) on his wife’s lover and eventually, her mother, who’s onto him for the first hit. Some movies were interested in unpacking the performance of masculinity and its accompanying cinematic tropes (war, cars, money, rage, misogyny, contract killing, et al.). Aggro Dr1ft and The Killer play very briefly (and the former just barely) with critiquing these tired totems, but neither goes very far with the idea. Whereas Hit Man plays delightfully and cleverly with notions of identity and gender performance and human mutability — Powell’s Gary Johnson tries on different varieties of manhood as literal costumes.

The best direct address of the hypermasc onslaught was from director Liliana Cavani, who was awarded Venice’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on its opening night and gave a powerful speech. “Cars are boring,” she said. “I’m sick to death of looking at cars in a movie.” Just kidding, she actually said this: “I’m the first female person to receive this award. There are women writers and directors who are working as well as men. It’s not quite right if we don’t give them a chance to be seen.”

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