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- The Brutalist
- Ainda Estou aqui
THE BRUTALIST
USA/UK/Hungary, 2023 – Director Brady Corbet – Cast Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin – Running time 215 min – Distribution Universal Pictures Italia
Brady Corbet is a fascinating character. A very talented actor, he starred in Mysterious Skin when he was sixteen. The film was in competition in the Orizzonti section in Venice in 2004 without achieving any awards, but the film industry found an actor for the future. After Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke wanted Corbet for the American remake of Funny Games. Then it was Lars Von Trier’s turn with Melancholia (2011), and the preference for great European directors continued with Bertrand Bonello, Ruben Östlund, and Olivier Assayas. Precisely in Clouds of Sils Maria, Corbet, who plays a young American actor, spoils his screenplay to Juliette Binoche, the one he would like to turn into his debut film. It was The Childhood of a Leader, which won the De Laurentiis Award for Best First Feature and Best Director in the Orizzonti section in Venice in 2015. The flirtation with the Lion would continue in 2018 with Vox Lux, the story of a rock star played by Natalie Portman, this time in the main competition, where Brady returns this year with his third film, The Brutalist. László Toth is a brilliant architect, a Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz. In 1947, he moved to the United States with his wife, Erzsébet. After a few years of struggle, he finds the person who will allow him to vent his creativity, the mysterious and wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren, who commissions a gigantic work, on which, however, Toth wants no creative interference. Genius and unruliness are the protagonists of Corbet’s cinema, as always assisted in the writing by Monia Fastvold, actress, screenwriter, producer, and Corbet’s life partner. For this ambitious project, the no-longer-actor director (he has not put himself in front of the camera since 2014) has chosen an all-star. It stars Adrien Brody as Toth, his wife is Felicity Jones, and the wealthy patron is Guy Pearce. As the artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera himself pointed out, the film draws its inspiration from a classic of American cinema, King Vidor’s The Marvelous Spring, which was based on the novel by Ayn Rand, a Russian-American writer, and philosopher who structured the current of objectivism, a philosophical system that sees the human being as a heroic creature who must have as a moral obligation the pursuit of happiness, productivity as the goal and reason as the absolute. Brady Corbet must have studied Ayn Rand’s writings at length.
Alessandro De Simone
AINDA ESTOU AQUI (I’M STILL HERE)
by WALTER SALLES
With Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro / Brazil, France / 135′
Brazil, 1971: a country in the tightening grip of a military dictatorship. When an arbitrary act of violence destroys her family’s life, a mother has to reinvent herself. ‘When I first read Ainda estou aqui by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, I was deeply moved,’ said the director.’ The story of the desaparecidos, the people snatched from their lives by the Brazilian dictatorship, was being told for the first time from the point of view of those left behind. The experience of one woman, Eunice Paiva, mother of five, contained both a story of survival of grief and a mirror of a wounded nation. It was also personal: I knew this family and was friends with the Paiva children. Their home remained etched in my memory. During the seven years, I spent creating Ainda estou aqui, life in Brazil veered dangerously close to the dystopia of the 1970s, which made telling this story all the more urgent’.
Tiziana Leone
