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Jonathan Demme jolts Venice filmfest with family drama
2008-09-03
VENICE, Italy (AFP) - US "Silence of the Lambs" director Jonathan Demme jolted Venice film critics Wednesday with a stirring new family drama that tightens the race for the festival's Golden Lion prize. His emotion-packed "Rachel Getting Married" stars Anne Hathaway as a recovering drug addict who shakes up her sister's wedding with an overdose of honesty about their dysfunctional family. "People ask me what it was like to play such a troubled character, such a tortured character, a character so consumed with darkness," Hathaway told a news conference. "But I never saw her in any of those ways. I just thought she was a girl struggling to live an honest life. And she is honest, fiercely, painfully, impolitely honest," Hathaway added. With the action packed into a wedding weekend at a sprawling family home, the film, which also stars Debra Winger as the sisters' mother, intentionally has the feel of a home video. "My documentary work really came into play in a big way," Demme said. The idea was "to make it feel as much as possible like a home movie ... (with) the implication of truth, (to) enhance the sense of involvement for the viewer," said Demme, who won an Oscar for "Silence of the Lambs" in 1991. Asked about the multi-cultural aspect of the film -- Rachel (Rosemary Dewitt) is white, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe) is black, and the bride and bridesmaids wear saris -- Demme said it reflected "the America that I feel very deeply connected to." "To me this group is normal," he said, noting that he initially offered the part of Sidney to Paul Thomas Anderson ("There Will Be Blood"). "It still would have been a diverse group of people ... That's the America I love. I saw that America recently last week at (US Democratic candidate for president) Barack Obama's induction," Demme said. "Rachel Getting Married" screened as this year's 65th Mostra faced biting criticism for a lack of compelling movies since it opened August 27. The Italian daily La Repubblica on Wednesday fretted that the world's oldest film festival has become "so tired." The Golden Lion and other prizes at Venice "no longer seem important to anyone," wrote La Repubblica's Natalia Aspesi. "In the past ... the jurors' every bat of an eye was scrutinised." French director Barbet Schroeder's American-style thriller set in Japan, "Inju, the Beast in the Shadow" and Mexican-born US director Guillermo Arriaga's drama "The Burning Plain" in particular fell short of expectations. But on Tuesday, Ethiopia's Haile Gerima got high marks for "Teza," in which an idealistic Ethiopian intellectual returns to his home village under Haile Mariam Mengistu's brutal 1970s-80s regime after studying medicine in Germany. Two Japanese films have also stood out -- Takeshi Kitano's whimsical "Achilles and the Tortoise" and Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated children's fantasy "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea." Festival director Marco Mueller on Tuesday dismissed growing criticism of this year's lineup -- described by the Guardian film critic Andrew Pulver as "plain porridge without sugar" -- and defended the "very good level" of the selection. "Why are you talking about last week's films, instead of those that are screening now?" Mueller asked in an interview, adding that the Italian press is harsher than the foreign critics. "And you haven't read yesterday's and today's dailies," he said. Still to come among the 21 films vying for the prestigious Golden Lion are Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" and Darren Aronotsky's "The Wrestler."
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