The Venice Film Festival is one of the most essential film events of the year, the bridge to the fall film-going season and an event that launches future award winners, top ten entries, and beloved classics. It’s also a remarkably diverse event in terms of film profiles with movies like “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and “Joker: Folie a Deux” playing alongside classic film restorations, 3.5-hour dramas, and original documentaries. This report on three Venice premieres from 2024 has a little bit of everything, including a near-future drama about the surveilled generation, a quasi-doc that’s one of the most winking music flicks ever made, and a gentle drama about end of life.
The best of the three is Neo Sora’s fiction feature debut, following quickly on the heels of his highly acclaimed doc about his father, “Ryuichi Sakamato: Opus.” He proves to have an incredibly confident eye, shooting his young performers in Tokyo against a backdrop of concrete roads and buildings in a manner that’s both mesmerizing and slightly terrifying. This is a generation that has grown up in a world of increased monitoring, and Sora’s script deftly charts two people heading in different directions under that oppressive system, one toward obedience and the other toward rebellion.
“Happyend” opens with a captivating and theme-defining sequence in which highschoolers Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka) sneak into a club to watch one of their favorite DJs. As the cops raid the establishment, the DJ keeps bumping as the crowd heads for the exits … except for Kou. He stays in the same spot, enjoying the beats. He’s not ready to give up yet.
Sora’s drama plays out against a backdrop of political turmoil in Tokyo, essentially reflected on a micro level in Yuta and Kou’s high school. A prank pulled on their Principal leads to a controversial new surveillance system that not only monitors the students but gives them demerits when they do something wrong. As the students begin to push back against Big Brother, these young people are forced to make decisions about what matters to them and how much they’re willing to fight for it.
At one point, Yuta says to Kou, “We’ll all die while you just merrily go on,” to which he responds, “If we’re going to die, let’s have fun.” There really is a turning point in life when a young person decides if they’re going to follow the rules or if they’re going to keep dancing to the DJ, and Sora’s excellent drama captures this crossroads beautifully, never leaning into melodrama but understanding that the stakes for these people are enormous, the kind of choices that can define future happiness.
Akin to “Rolling Thunder Revue” or “I’m Still Here,” Alex Ross Perry‘s “Pavements” is a defiant manipulation of the very form of the music bio-doc, which is a good thing. Personally, the traditional bio-doc, formed by anecdotes, usually arranged chronologically, is driving me slowly insane. So realizing early in “Pavements” that Perry was attempting to capture a left-of-center band with a very left-of-center film got my attention. I’m not sure that the bit doesn’t wear out its welcome in this incredibly long film (over two hours), but I absolutely admire everyone’s commitment to it.
The story goes that instead of a documentary filmmaker, Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus wanted to hire a screenwriter, “but he didn’t want a screenplay.” Perry, the director of “Her Smell” and the Pavement video “Harness Your Hopes” took up that challenge in a big way. His “Pavements” has some of the elements of a music doc, including archival footage set against more recent clips of the band’s reunion tours, but it also features some stuff that’s, well, different. There’s a bit of analysis of the building of a pop-up museum about the band, but the real head-scratchers are the making-of two Pavement products: a jukebox musical called Slanted! Enchanted with Zoe Lister-Jones & Michael Esper and a traditional biopic called “Range Life” starring Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, and Jason Schwartzman. Everyone involved in both projects takes both them and the band very seriously, and the stage musical even played in New York in 2022 to, well, mixed reviews. Footage of the fake movie sometimes plays like parody of flicks like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but often plays it straight too.
So much of “Pavements” is a winking nod to the very idea of making a movie about a band, which is undeniably ambitious but also a bit grating in its self-awareness at times. Still, it’s just good enough that eternal pessimist Malkmus will probably hate it.
Sarah Friedland’s “Familiar Touch” opens with a tender, heartbreaking scene. The great H. Jon Benjamin (Bob Belcher and Sterling Archer, among about a hundred other voices) is taking his mother Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) to an assisted living facility for her increasingly dangerous dementia. Ruth doesn’t even realize he’s her son, first thinking they’re going on a date together. When she’s told the truth, you can see the heartbreaking confusion in Chalfant’s eyes.
Friedland’s film is about the cruelty of dementia, but also about how people in the throes of it will often find things to hold onto that feel familiar. Ruth can’t remember her son but does know precisely how to make borscht. A scene in which she basically takes over the kitchen at the facility is a fantastic one, weighted with tension because we know the depths of her condition but also tactile and warm at the same time.
Ruth finds herself drawn to the staff of the home more than the residents, not in a traditional “movie denial” sense but in one that feels true and character driven. She becomes friends with two of the workers there (Carolyn Michelle and Andy McQueen), and there’s a tense moment that leads to an escape attempt, but “Familiar Touch” is a subdued, character-driven film, one that finds its strength as much in a soundscape as Ruth floats in a pool as it does through dialogue. After all, words have betrayed Ruth as they have lost so much of their meaning due to a horrible illness. What Friedland keenly understands is the power of what’s unsaid, how memories can tie themselves to sound, smell, and touch too, and how sometimes those are the last to go.
