ON THIS PAGE:
- Ferrari by Michael Mann
- El Conde by Pablo Larraìn
FERRARI
USA, 2023, Director Michael Mann Starring Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell, Patrick Dempsey, Running time 130′ Distribution: Black Bear International, Leone Film Group s.p.a.
Since 2015, when he directed the underrated action thriller Blackhat, Michael Mann has not returned behind the camera. Ferrari, based on the biography Enzo Ferrari – The Man and the Machine (Penguin Books Ltd, 2019) written by Brock Yates, is the new challenge for the director of such masterpieces as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Collateral (shown out of competition in Venice in 2006) and Public Enemy (2009).
To understand how long Michael Mann had been thinking about this project, suffice it to note that he co-wrote early versions of the screenplay with the late Troy Kennedy-Martin (An Italian Job; Danko), who passed away in 2009 before putting his hand to it numerous times in what editor Pietro Scalia (Oscar winner for JFK – An Open Case and Black Hawk Down – Black Hawk shot down) warned was not a biopic, “but a film focused on a precise moment in Enzo Ferrari’s life, in 1957, where family and work events are intertwined. It is a complex film, a Shakespearean drama.” The story is set in the summer of 1957, a year of professional and personal crisis for former racing driver Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver): bankruptcy brought down the company he and his wife Laura Dominica Garello (Penélope Cruz) founded only ten years earlier. The marriage was severely tested by the death of their son Dino, who died prematurely in 1956 at only 24 years of age from Duchenne dystrophy, as well as Ferrari’s relationship with Laura Lardi (Shailene Woodley), by whom he had son Piero. In such a delicate context, Ferrari is convinced that there is only one thing capable of healing the last painful defeats of his life: betting everything he has on a car race that travels all over Italy, later to become famous as the Mille Miglia, hoping to save his team.
Mann had initially thought of Christian Bale as Ferrari, later replaced by Hugh Jackman, before Adam Driver finally landed the role in January 2022, thus returning to play after Maurizio Gucci in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, one of the most celebrated protagonists of Italian history. Alongside Driver, in addition to the two women in Ferrari’s life embodied by Penélope Cruz and Shailene Woodley, we find Patrick Dempsey (a car enthusiast in life as well, founder with Alessandro Del Piero of the Dempsey Del Piero Proton team and two-time participant in the 24 Hours of Le Mans) playing driver Piero Taruffi, while Jack O’Connell takes on the role of Peter Collins.
By Oscar Cosulich
EL CONDE
Chile, 2023, Director Pablo Larraín, Starring Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro, Paula Luchsinger, Stella Gonet, Antonia Zegers, Marcial Tagle, Amparo Noguera, Diego Muñoz, Catalina Runtime 110′
To enrich an already exciting competition, the 80th Venice International Film Festival brings Pablo Larraín back to the Lido, certainly among the directors who have emerged in recent years most beloved by cinephiles and continues a tradition that had also seen him present his previous Ema (in 2019) and Spencer (in 2021) at the Biennale Cinema. With El Conde, the Chilean director returns to the more surreal avenues of his cinema, mixing the biographicalism of his last trials with his habit of telling the story of Chile and its wounds, always critical of the recent history of his country and the regime it suffered.
That of the coup dictator Augusto Pinochet, who in the film comes back to life as a vampire in a kind of parallel universe in which he lives hidden in a ruined palace on the frigid southern tip of the continent. Now exhausted, at the ripe old age of two hundred and fifty, Pinochet is fed up with eternal life and the disgrace he feels he deserves. After cruelty and murder, he just wants to die–until an unexpected relationship encourages him to live a new life full of counterrevolutionary passion.
The tones will be those of black comedy, with horror overtones and with some stylistic winks to Aleksandr Sokurov’s Trilogy of Power and German Expressionism of the 1920s-all promising premises for a film that those who cannot make it to the Lido can catch up with immediately after the end of the Festival, starting September 15, on Netflix. “A place where directors I greatly admire have made precious films,” Larraín had called the streaming platform, somewhat explaining the choice he made for this new film of his (next will be the “long-awaited dream” biopic on Callas, Maria, starring Angelina Jolie, which will start shooting in October in Budapest).
An “adventure” in black and white, again in the words of the person concerned, a return to his roots which the Chilean director wanted by his side – in addition to co-writer Guillermo Calderón (with him already in Ema, Neruda, The Club) – many actors he has already directed in the past, from Jaime Vadell (No), as the redivivivus Pinochet, and Alfredo Castro (Tony Manero) to Paula Luchsinger (Ema), Diego Muñoz, Antonia Zegers and Amparo Noguera. All witnesses to a career in which Pinochet himself was often at the centre-directly and otherwise the events recounted in the different films. Confirming the Chilean director’s clear desire not to let people forget the horrors that began with the September 11, 1973, Golpe in which President Salvador Allende lost his life.
“The one in the film is an old idea,” Larraín recently explained, “based on the most dangerous of concepts, that a figure like Pinochet’s can be eternal and that evil can survive.” “I don’t know if it can be an allegory because it is straightforward. I think it’s right to say something like this when it seems history is repeating itself, to remind us how dangerous we are,” he concluded.
By Mattia Pasquini
