Venice Film Festival: Brutal Affairs

There are many reason to attend major international film festivals, but one is that we all traipse to places like Venice, whatever the expense or comfort, to glimpse something truly great.

Yet it can also feel like jumping the gun, or too prompt in declaring a new film that, whether it’s just greatness or that unfortunate word “masterpiece”. But Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is clearly something special, and if it very self-consciously has designs to be that, it often wears that ambition quite lightly.

Not adoring the previous two films - Vox Lux and The Childhood of a Leader - of this budding young actor-turned-director, I really appreciated how the film begins unveiling its story quite clearly and directly, without wanting to obfuscate or be fashionably cryptic, however enjoyable that might also be. Yet if it doesn’t quite do that either in its more melodramatic second half, it begins to turn pleasingly dark and tragic. Pitilessly so. But not before a jarring, and optimistic 80’s-set coda.

Adrien Brody excels as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who manages to get a boat ticket to Ellis Island after the Soviets liberated his home country. At its core, this is a very comprehensible story of immigrant estrangement, in a mid-century, Mitteleuropean key compared to the thematically similar stories we’ve seen in the aftermath of the current refugee crisis. I can relate to this partially in my own life, as part of a highly displaced extended family, but Corbet and his co-screenwriter and partner Mona Fastvold show how his unsteady grasp of colloquial American English, his raffish and severe personal manner, and also his religiousness make him a brick too jagged and misshapen to fit in any American wall.

His life is upturned when, after establishing himself as a furniture maker in rustbelt Pennsylvania with the assistance of his petit-bourgeois cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), the local oligarch Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearce, charismatic) entrusts him for a new commission. An obvious vanity project and reputation-laundering plaything for the millionaire, this will be a cultural enrichment centre dedicated to his influential mother - complete with a theatre, lecture hall and also a chapel - and Tóth will labour on it for years, his disenchantment with his adopted home growing.

His brilliant wife Erszébet comes much later to America, and another rich seam in The Brutalist is how it explores love and sexuality. Whilst cycling through prostitution, addiction and queerness in its tour of the city underbellies that Tóth frequents, I was moved by the end for its tribute to the unique partnership in love and life László and Erszébet were able to cement amidst all their multi-continental strife. The most affecting films are personal: of course, this one was made in collaboration by a couple.

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Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics, playing Out of Competition, took us perceptively into contemporary Brazil’s perilous state, its unity threatened by far-right populism and its evangelical revival. Another joy of these events is finding complementary films, and whilst Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here is more muted than Costa’s passionate film-essay, its still gets us thinking about the country’s recurrent swings between the far-right and left, as well as its particularly Latin American sense of old-fashioned family values.

Chekhovian in its equally warm and prickly look at family life, I’m Still Here is the true story of the Brazilian Labour Party politician Rubens Paiva, who was arrested and forcibly “disappeared” in 1971 after alleged links to armed resistance against Brazil’s military dictatorship. But Salles and writers Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega depict this through the prism of his left-behind wife Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and their five children, giving it the aura of a Hollywood “women’s picture” in her new, matriarchal control of the family and her dogged, doomed fight to free him.

Whilst this focus provides many touching scenes, and two separate epilogues taking place in the 1996 and 2014 help us understand the echoes of this incident in the relative present, the film has a softer focus and more sentimental core than we’d like, feeling like a humanist plea for understanding and tolerance, when there are more incisive angles to ponder its issues. Yet Salles’s direction also conveys life under oppression in a southern-hemisphere country in intuitive terms: there is upbeat psychedelic rock music, football on the beach, and that uncanny, golden tropical sunlight bearing down on the sea, but armed convoys patrol down every street, with the country’s urban areas truly under occupation. It may seem like freedom, but it really isn’t.