Brooding clouds have gathered over Venice – and not just the ones that brought rain sluicing down on the heads of arriving critics as they scuttled down the alleyways to their hotels last night. The 80th edition of the city’s film festival is unfolding under strange conditions, thanks to the ongoing Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strike.
In the end, only one studio, Warner Bros, ended up pulling a film from the programme outright. That was Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, a love-triangle drama set in the world of professional tennis, which was originally going to open the festival this evening.
But the place is a ghost town, with only a handful of stars flying in to promote their work, having secured waivers from the unions first. One of them is Adam Driver, who stars with Penélope Cruz in Ferrari, a racing biopic directed by Michael Mann and due to premiere tomorrow. But Bradley Cooper, whose Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro screens on Saturday, is thought to be staying away, as are Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and the rest of the cast of Poor Things, the hotly anticipated Alasdair Gray adaptation that plays on Friday.
In lieu of the usual glossy gondola arrivals, we’re making do with trailers. The one for The Killer, an existential suspense thriller from David Fincher which plays on Sunday, was released online earlier this week. Its star Michael Fassbender, now acting again after an unlikely sabbatical driving at Le Mans, sports a heck of a look in it: a beige cagoule over a dark Hawaiian shirt, topped with sunglasses and a bucket hat. Not quite #redcarpetready, but this year we’ll take what we can get.
And for the opening film, what we got was Comandante: a gruff and glowering submarine thriller from Italy’s Edoardo De Angelis. Set during the Second World War’s early years, it offers a selection of sweaty, string-vesty, bulgy-bare-armsy scenes from the life of the real-life submarine commander Salvatore Todaro, played here by Pierfranceso Favino. It isn’t dreadful, but it seems unlikely to play in British cinemas any time soon, and was surely meant for a less exposed slot before being drafted as Challengers’ replacement.
