International big-wigs at the Lido

Bernardo Bertolucci, Woody Allen and the Coen brothers to attend Venice film festival

Acclaimed international heavyweights such as Bernardo Bertolucci, the Coen brothers and Michael Winterbottom will honouring the 60th edition of Venice film festival this year. Director Moritz de Hadeln unveiled a largely European crop of titles which also feature an ample offering of English-language fare, along with a smattering of Asian cinema.
The notable absence of several titles that had been thought to be locked into the festival roster, and may have been pulled, such as Jane Campion's In the Cut - confirmed for the Toronto festival - and others that aren't ready, like Wong Kar-wai's 2046 and Ingmar Bergman's Saraband, suggest a last-minute scramble to fill key slots.
"The selection this year was especially difficult because of the extremely high number of submissions, more than 1,600 works - including shorts - 400 of which were offered to us in the past two weeks," the Venice chief said at a packed Rome press conference last week. "This means that some works will be unspooling in Venice in an as-yet-not-entirely completed form," de Hadeln added.
These include a not-final-cut copy of the Coen brother's romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty, from Universal, starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones - both of whom are expected to attend the fest - which will screen in an out-of-competition slot.
Alejandro Gonzales-Inarritu's Amores Perros followup, 21 Grams, will be shown with the sound not yet burned into the negative. The drama about three people whose destinies intersect after a car accident in Memphis stars Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts, all of whom are expected to make the trek to the Lido. The Mexican director's English-language drama is the only U.S. entry in competition.
Other English-language titles vying for a Golden Lion are Michael Winterbottom's sci-fi romance Code 46, starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton as genetically incompatible lovers, and Christopher Hampton's Imagining Argentina, about the plight of that country's desaparecidos, starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson. They comprise a sizable British contingent which also includes Stephen Norrington's Victorian age comic book actioner The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, starring Sean Connery; and a work-in-progress of the second installment of Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy, as a special event.
Also screening will be James Ivory's Paris-set romantic comedy Le Divorce, starring Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts and Glenn Close, and Ridley Scott's grifter comedy Matchstick Men, starring Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell.
Also screening out-of-competition is Robert Benton's adaptation of the Phillip Roth novel The Human Stain, starring Anthony Hopkins as a professor forced to resign from a New England college after being unfairly charged with racism, and Nicole Kidman as his lover.
Robert Rodriguez will bring his epic drug Western Once Upon a Time in Mexico starring Antonio Banderas, Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek; while Jim Jarmusch will be present with his new film Coffee and Cigarettes, also out of competition.
The festival will open with Woody Allen's Anything Else starring Christina Ricci, Jason Biggs and Danny de Vito who are expected to attend. Allen, who has never attended the festival, is also expected to be present.
Besides Bertolucci's The Dreamers - which is set against the backdrop of the Paris 1968 student riots and unspooling out of competition - Italian movies include Marco Bellocchio's Buongiorno Notte, a drama centered around psychological impact of the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro; and Paolo Benvenuti's Segreti di Stato, which depicts the cover-up of a CIA-ordered killing of communist militants in 1951 Sicily. Also in competition is Italian director Edoardo Winspeare's The Miracle, about a boy in Southern Italy believed to have supernatural powers.
A career Golden Lion will go to Dino De Laurentiis, the veteran Italian producer.

The Venice Film Festival runs August 27 to September 6.

Publication Date: 2003-08-10
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