Each day during the 2024 Venice Film Festival, IndieWire will update this article with a review of the day’s screenings, activities, and buzz.
Pardon me for kicking things off with an esoteric complaint, but as someone who often has to go to a premiere in order to take the audience’s reaction into consideration for a film’s awards prospects, my 2024 Venice Film Festival experience has been uniquely stressful.
While attendees book tickets to screenings through a website, as is the case with most of the major film festivals now, many of the big premieres at Venice aren’t listed for press and industry passholders, so I’ve spent a good percentage of my last two days asking anyone who would hear me if they had a connect to get into the first public screening of Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.”
I spent much of yesterday in a panic about getting into the opening ceremony/”Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” premiere as well, and booked last-minute press and industry screening tickets for both films just in case, so while other cinephiles wait for their chance to see these two highly anticipated movies for the first time, I now have the unique distinction of seeing the same Venice premiere twice in one day, two days in a row. Not the worst experience, but also not in line with the La Dolce Vita lifestyle I expected would come with this first time to La Biennale.
Anyhow, the benefit of Cate Blanchett starring in a TV series being screened in its entirety at the festival is having her around for two days of press and premieres. At the press conference for “Disclaimer” on Apple TV+, the two-time Oscar winner poetically talked about how private conversations may be a better solve than publicly shaming people just as easily as she dismissed a question from an international reporter if she plans to wear anything interesting to the show’s world premiere: “I’m going naked.” Both answers sort of fit in a conversation about her Alfonso Cuarón-helmed limited series in which she plays a documentarian whose past catches up with her via a spicy written novel.
Before we get back to the operatic elephant in the room, other notable films that had their world premiere at Venice on August 29 include Errol Morris’ latest documentary, “Separated,” about the Trump Administration’s border control policy that split parents from their children. Though the film does not yet have a distributor, it definitely has a built-in audience of MSNBC diehards, as the film is an adaptation of a book of the same name by NBCNews Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff, a fan favorite in many a coastal suburban household.
Both “Kill the Jockey,” from Argentinean director Luis Ortega, and “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” from Oscar-nominated Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa, put a spotlight on South American filmmaking, while documentary “Riefenstahl” and narrative film “September 5,” starring Peter Sarsgaard, had audiences looking at controversial Olympics broadcasts through a new lens, fresh off the broadcast success of the recent games in Paris.
But ultimately, the talk of the town was Angelina Jolie in promotion of her Maria Callas biopic that just got acquired by Netflix for U.S. distribution. At the press conference for “Maria,” she skillfully curtailed any talk of her ongoing divorce from Brad Pitt without denying that those struggles played a role in her take on the opera icon.
At the world premiere itself, attendees readily stood waiting in the lobby, virtually turning the venue into a sweat lodge, to catch a glimpse of the star as she walked into the Sala Grande. At first, it was hard to read how the audience was responding to it. Like the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” premiere, “Maria” had some objectively funny diva moments that were met with absolute silence from the crowd. Were they enthralled or appalled by the latest of Larraín’s portraits of pivotal women?
It took the title card finally coming on screen, after a montage of real-life photos of Callas, for the audience to get their applause going, and once they started, they did not stop until long after the credits, when Larraín himself had to finally start guiding his cast and crew out of the theater, which had already turned on house lights to try and end the event in a timely fashion.
Receiving that much positive feedback would likely be an overwhelming moment for anyone, so it is understandable that the audience’s enthusiastic response to the film would bring Jolie and company to tears. If the Venice crowd is at all a bellwether for how the rest of viewers will react to “Maria,” though, the actress and her collaborators on the film may just have to get used to it.
For more on the 2024 Venice Film Festival, read IndieWire’s diary entry detailing the highlights from Day One.
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