Poor Things richly rewarded with Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos takes home top prize five years after coming second with ‘The Favourite’
It was never in much doubt. Yorgos Lanthimos’s audacious, sexy, troubling surrealist parable Poor Things has won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The Greek director’s exuberant adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel established itself as a critical darling early on in this year’s event and clearly also dazzled the Venice jury, led this year by La La Land director Damien Chazelle. The victory means that Lanthimos goes one better than five years ago when The Favourite came second to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.
That year, Olivia Colman took home the Best Actress prize and repeated the feat at the Oscars six months later. Stone will be a strong contender to win her second Oscar (after La La Land) next year, though in Venice she was beaten to the Best Actress prize by Cailee Spaeny for her gently nuanced work as Elvis Presley’s woebegone wife in Sofia Coppola’s slightly underpowered Priscilla. Peter Sarsgaard was named Best Actor for his performance opposite Jessica Chastain in Michel Franco’s Memory, a New York-set story of trauma and recovery from Mexico’s master of grim intensity (Chronic, New Order).
Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) picked up a rightful runner-up Grand Jury Prize for Evil Does Not Exist, his fascinating drama exploring the arrival of glamping and urban greed in a small rural town. A baffling Best Screenplay went to Guillermo Calderón and Pablo Larraín for the underwhelming El Conde, a vampiric satire directed at former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Two films casting light on the global migrant crisis also fared well. The third-place Special Jury Prize went the way of Green Border, a well-reviewed drama by Poland’s Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa), set in the border region between her country and Belarus. Meanwhile, the Silver Lion for direction was claimed by Matteo Garrone for Lo Capitano, which follows a Senegalese teenager desperately striving to reach Europe. He is played by Seydou Sarr, who also won the Best Young Actor award. It marks a change of pace for Garrone, better known for tough crime dramas such as Gomorrah and piquant fantasies such as Tale of Tales and Pinocchio.
In an 80th edition of the festival diminished at times by the ongoing American actors’ and writers’ strike, it was left to Sarsgaard to address the issue of contention, in particular Hollywood’s use of AI. “We all here agree that an actor is a person and a writer is a person, but it seems we can’t, and that’s terrifying because this work is about connection,” he said. “Without that . . . this holy experience of being human will be handed over to the machines and the eight billionaires who own them. So if we lose that battle in the strike, our industry will be the first of many to fall.”