By Lindsey Bahr, Film Writer
VENICE, Italy (AP) --“The Brutalist,” a post-war epic about a Holocaust survivor attempting to rebuild a life in America, is a fantasy. But filmmaker Brady Corbet wishes it weren’t.
“The film is about the physical manifestation of the trauma of the 20th century,” Corbet said Sunday at the Venice Film Festival. “It’s dedicated to the artists that didn’t get to realize their vision.”
In part inspired by the late Jean-Louis Cohen’s book “Architecture in Uniform,” the film starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian architect had its world premiere Sunday afternoon.
Spanning decades, “The Brutalist” tells the story of László Tóth and his attempts to pursue his art after the war in America. Brody plays Tóth, and Felicity Jones his wife, Erzsébet. He lives in near-poverty until a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), gives him an important contract. Joe Alwyn and Alessandro Nivola also star.
Brody said it was a character and a story he felt an “immediate kinship and understanding for.” His mother, photographer Sylvia Plachy, was a Hungarian immigrant who fled in 1956 during the anti-Soviet revolution to restart and attempt to build a life as an artist.
“Even though it’s fiction, it feels very real and very real to me,” Brody said. “That’s so important for me to embody a character and make it real.”
Running 215-minutes (with a 15-minute intermission) and presented in 70mm (it was shot in Vista Vision), “The Brutalist” arrived in Venice with expectations high. Reviews were mostly positive, hailing its ambition and Brody’s performance.
Even the 70mm format alone seemed like a bold statement for a film without U.S. distribution left: Though a favorite of cinephiles, the expense seems to be reserved for a select few, like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve. In other words, not often something afforded to an indie.
Wearing sunglasses, Corbet was feeling emotional speaking about the film, which he’d worked on for seven years.
“This film does everything that we are told we are not allowed to do,” said Corbet. He added that conversations about runtime are “silly.”
“I’ve read great novellas, I’ve read great multi-volume masterpieces,” Corbet said. “Maybe the next thing I make will be about 45 minutes, and I should be allowed to do that. … As Harmony Korine once said, cinema is stuck in the birth canal. And I agree with him.”
In 2018 Corbet brought his divisive “Vox Lux,” in which Natalie Portman plays a pop star who witnessed a school shooting in her youth, to Venice. He earlier premiered “The Childhood of a Leader” there. Corbet, also an actor, wrote the script with his wife Mona Fastvold, who is also a filmmaker (“The World to Come”). Corbet thanked the Venice Film Festival for supporting him.
“When no one was supporting these films, this festival was,” he said. “It made my films possible.”
“The Brutalist” is playing in competition at the festival, which is well underway having already hosted glamorous premieres with Angelina Jolie (“Maria”), Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”), Cate Blanchett (“Disclaimer”), Jude Law (“The Order”) with many more to come.
Review: “His Three Daughters” From Writer-Director Azazel Jacobs
Death isn't like it is in the movies, a character explains in "His Three Daughters." Elizabeth Olsen's Christina is telling her sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), a story about their father, who became particularly agitated one evening while watching a movie on television in the aftermath of his wife's passing.
It's not exactly a fun memory, or present, for any of them. This is, after all, also a movie about death.
The three women have gathered in their father's small New York apartment for his final days. He's barely conscious, confined to a room that they take shifts monitoring as they wait out this agonizingly unspecific clock. But even absent the stresses of hospice, tensions would be high for Christina, Katie and Rachel, estranged and almost strangers who are about to lose the one thread still binding them. Taken together, it's a pressure cooker and a wonderful showcase for three talented actors.
Writer-director Azazel Jacobs has scripted and filmed "His Three Daughters," streaming Friday on Netflix, like a play. The dialogue often sounds more scripted than conversational (except for Lyonne, who makes everything sound her own); the locations are confined essentially to a handful of rooms in the apartment, with the communal courtyard providing the tiniest bit of breathing room.
Jacobs drops the audience into the middle of things, dolling out background and information slowly and purposefully. Coon's Katie gets the first word, a monologue really, about the state of things as she sees it and how this is going to work. She's the eldest, a type-A ball of anxiety, the mother of a difficult teenage daughter and the type of person who can barely conceal either disappointment or deep resentment. Katie also lives in... Read More