A decent 69th Venice film festival has served up an eclectic mix, from Terrence Malick's quest for God to Paul Thomas Anderson's potent drama about a blustering cult leader
Inside the main cinema at the Venice film festival the screen hosts a languid drift of evening shadows and world-weary bison. "What is this love that loves you?" inquires the murmurous voiceover. "Where are we when we're here?" I don't think it's the bison speaking but, as ever with the work of Terrence Malick, it's hard to say for sure.
To the Wonder arrives midway through this year's event. It comes tipped as a festival highlight, another masterpiece from the American visionary, but it catches the delegates in a scratchy mood and they send it off with a chorus of boos. It seems that there is no film disaster more spectacular than the movie that overreaches itself; the one that gropes for the heavens and comes up shy.
Actually, there's much to love about To the Wonder, a distinctively swooning meditation on romance gone sour and the existence of God. Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko play the ill-starred couple whose relationship blossoms in France and then flounders in Texas. Malick dips lightly in and out of the plot and arranges his movie stars as figures in a wider canvas, shooting Affleck from behind, in profile, or half out of shot. On boarding a Malick production, A-list actors accept they will sometimes be required to play second fiddle to the whirl of leaves in the Jardin du Luxembourg or the bounce of a wasp against the living-room ceiling.
For all that, the film lacks the scope, rigour and rapture of the director's finest work, while its wafting rhythms sometimes verge on self-parody. The delegates snigger when Javier Bardem bobs up at the pulpit, playing the local priest. They tut in fury as Kurylenko begins another of her irksome, arms-aloft dances through the whispering grass. It should be noted, however, that Malick suffered a similar response when The Tree of Life, played at Cannes last year – and still went on to claim first prize.
Upstairs at a nearby hotel, director Paul Thomas Anderson is keeping the faith. "Have you seen Terry's film?" he asks me. "Is it wonderful? Is it really experimental?" Anderson was weaned on Malick, Altman, Scorsese, the big lions of 70s American cinema, and they remain his idols. He seems unaware that the old order has changed and that the student has now moved past the mentor.
Anderson's new drama, The Master, remains far and away the most potent film in competition, perfectly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a blustering cult leader and Joaquin Phoenix as the drifter who joins him. Controversy looks likely, thanks to a narrative that implicitly lifts the lid on Scientology, although Anderson explains that the film's main inspiration was actually the early life of John Steinbeck, rattling up the coast of California and wanting to be at sea. In other words, the drifter came first. The explosive figure of L Ron Hubbard (here remodelled as "Lancaster Dodd") was merely drafted in later to balance the ticket.
Elsewhere, Olivier Assayas's semi-autobiographical Something in the Air plays like the sunny B-side to his last film, Carlos, spotlighting the interface between heavy-duty terrorism and the bohemian 70s left. The film charts the fortunes of the bright young members of France's "high-school movement", fighting running battles with the gendarmes before lighting out on a freewheeling fugitive jaunt across Europe. These kids want to change the world, create great art and get laid to boot. Assayas observes their questing surge and dying fall with a warm, wry compassion.
Rather to my surprise, I also relished Spring Breakers. Harmony Korine's woozy, sleazy joyride through the college-caper genre amounts to a sustained demolition job on the squeaky-clean image of its stars, dispatching Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens on a vertiginous tour of the fleshpots of Florida. Halfway through, Gomez's heroine wants out; she can't take it. "This isn't what I signed up for!" she keeps squawking. Hudgens, by contrast, rides the film right through to its breakneck finale.
Other high points came courtesy of Bernard Rose's Boxing Day – a bracing tour of the foreclosed homesteads of middle America – and Wadjda, Haifaa al-Mansour's heartfelt social-realist tale of an 11-year-old's rebel stance in a Saudi Arabia where girls are forbidden even to laugh outdoors ("a woman's voice is her nakedness," the teacher explains). Fill the Void provides a forensic examination of arranged marriage within the Orthodox Hassidic community, while Manoel de Oliveira's gloomy, confined Gebo and the Shadow sparks up quite beautifully when Jeanne Moreau suddenly shuffles into the kitchen clutching her embroidery, unbowed and radiant in her 85th year.
By the end of the second week, Venice is winding down, the critics are departing and attention turns to Toronto – the next event on an overstuffed calendar. Those who remain take their seats for the evening screening, or smoke one last hurried cigarette by the open doors. Our heads are twirling with images of Colorado mountains, college-girl gangsters, brick-throwing activists and foursquare buffalo. The consensus is that the 69th Venice film festival has been a decent vintage, serving up an eclectic blend of old masters and fresh produce and standing as a relaxed, rosy corrective to the madness of Cannes.
Except that we're not quite done yet. At the designated time, the steely public address system instructs us to sit down instantly and turn off our phones and then thanks us "for your collaboration". The double doors bang shut and the lights go out. At such moments, plunged into the abiding blackness of the Sala Darsena, it's possible to believe that the spirit of Il Conformista is still alive and well in the Venice of today.