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.
After Documentaries About Taylor Swift and Brooke Shields, Director Lana Wilson Turns Her Camera To NYC Psychics
Filmmaker Lana Wilson had never thought much about psychics. But the morning after Election Day in 2016, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, she found herself drawn towards a sign that promised "$5 psychic readings" and wandered in.
Much to her surprise, she found it to be a rather profound experience. She can barely even remember what was said, but it was emotional and comforting. And it would set her on a seven-year journey to make a documentary about this strange and misunderstood tradition, "Look Into My Eyes," which expands in theaters this week.
"I think I had totally misjudged the whole psychic tradition," Wilson said. "I had trivialized it and seen it as this silly thing, despite the fact that millions of people around the world engage in it… I'd had this personal experience where I, as a lifelong skeptic, found comfort in a psychic one day. So part of my initial perspective was what if it doesn't matter if it's real or not?
In the years since that fateful encounter, Wilson's own profile has raised significantly for her documentaries about Taylor Swift, " Miss Americana," and Brooke Shields, " Pretty Baby." But the idea of the psychics lingered. The film, unjudgmental, funny and poignant, takes viewers inside the homes, and sessions, of several New York City psychics
Wilson spoke about her process, her revelations and why she decided to not take Shields up on her offer to be one of the subjects in this one. Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Did you find many of your friends shared your own assumptions about psychics?
WILSON: One of my closest friends is a therapist and she immediately got it. She was like, "This is totally different than therapy. But, also,... Read More