By Nicole Winfield
VENICE, Italy (AP) --There's been a lot of talk about gender parity, feminism and equality at the Venice Film Festival this year, with nearly half the in-competition films directed by women. One of them, "Miss Marx," certainly backs that trend.
The historical drama profiles Karl Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, an innovative British-born social activist and women's rights campaigner who wrote the first English translation of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary."
But Italian director Susanna Nicchiarelli also sought to highlight the less-than-empowered side of Miss Marx, who for years tolerated her louse of a partner as he cheated on her, squandered her money and otherwise humiliated her.
"The focus was on the dichotomy between the public activism and her public beliefs and the inconsistency with her private relationship," said Romola Garai, who plays Eleanor in the film. "We are left to wonder why and how human beings can be so eloquent on the one hand, and that can so not enter your psyche on the other hand."
Nicchiarelli said she was drawn to this internal conflict, which she said was both touching and deeply human.
"That says so much about the way we are," she said.
To hammer home the current-day relevance of that dichotomy, the film's score includes punk rock music and Nicchiarelli spliced in archival footage of 20th-century labor protests to "whip the audience into this insistence" that the issues Marx fought for still haven't been resolved, Garai said.
"The wheel of history has turned through the 20th century, but the same conversation about the dynamic around capitalism and who benefits from it is the same," said Garai, who said she first learned about Eleanor Marx's contribution to labor and feminist causes working on the 2015 British historical drama "Sufragette."
The film "Miss Marx" is one of eight directed by women that is competing for the top Golden Lion award in the main competition at Venice, which wraps up Sept. 12. The Venice festival has long been criticized for the lack of female directors in its in-competition films, with only four films made by women in the 62 films that competed for the Golden Lion between 2017 and 2019, and only four women winning the Golden Lion in the festival's history.
This year, 44% of the in-competition films were directed by women.
"I dream of the day when it will no longer be interesting to talk about how many women there are in a festival, and we will no longer count how many they are," Nicchiarelli said. "Having said as much, Eleanor Marx really is important. She gave an enormous contribution to history, also, for her feminist ideas."
Louise Dixon contributed.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads โ essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More