Klara's cinema

Yesterday was a hectic day resulting (as the festival flow goes) in us seeing first an absolute masterpiece, then a good movie followed by a total disaster and ending with an acceptable movie.

The masterpiece obviously deserves the biggest place in here. Wim Wenders has focused a lot in the latest years on documentary filming. Given the amount of legendary fictions he has granted us with in the past (“Paris, Texas”, “The Wings of Desire”, “The American Friend” etc.), one might wish for him to continue in that direction. Here and there he still offers us one of those, such as “Perfect Days” in 2023.

But the fact is that Wim Wenders is an as talented documentary film maker as he is a fiction film maker. In my experience (and if we disregard a few hiccups that each one of us is entitled to throughout his/her career) going to see a Wim Wenders movie – it being fiction or document – comes with a high probability of seeing something special and unique. And yesterday was indeed very special and absolutely unique.

I have not seen all of Wenders’ documentaries but from the ones I have seen until now (on Salgado, on Pina Bausch, on Anselm Kiefer), this one, focusing on Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, might be the most perfect to date – and that already taking into consideration the fact that the previous ones did not have that many flaws.

Why is this one particularly extraordinary? Firstly because Wenders seems to have by now mastered to perfection the 3D filming techique he recently became fond of.

Side note to give you an insider’s festival experience: the screening had to be interrupted and restarted after 10 minutes yesterday because the right and left lenses had been inverted and the 3D glasses did not work properly. Master Wenders intervened himself to explain to the entire Sala Grande what had happened and to beg for patience and forgiveness until the problem would be resolved. Funny thing is that by then, I had already written the first paragraphs of my blog in my head, commenting on how 3D does not add that much to the experience.

I had to erase these paragraphs from my head once the problem got fixed and Wender’s talent with 3D became obvious throughout the screening.

To be noted also that the subject of the movie is particularly well suited for 3D. Zumthor is considered as a slow architect, a perfectionist, with only a few projects but that always focus on making his buildings blend with their environment. In that context, 3D is a good assistant as it allows you to almost physically enter these buildings, fully seize their atmosphere and grab a good sense of their surroundings from every perspective.

Add to it that Wenders has a sense for the cut and the music and that Peter Zumthor is an architect philosopher who makes you feel and understand his projects with only a few words. And that’s exactly why you end up in total enchantment. This one movie was already worth coming to Venice in 2026. Since yesterday, I thus consider my Mostra as a successful one and I am at peace with wathever comes next.

What came next yesterday was Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” – a pretty entertaining and watchable piece, I would say. It retraces the early days of reality TV shows in the US – this specific one focusing on tracking, attracting (through online chatting and actors pretending to be underaged children) and catching live on TV, pedophiles.

It offers yet another good Robert Pattinson performance this year, it is well rythmed and well cut. Its weakness though is that it lacks any kind of deep dive into the characters’ psychology. And given the questionability of used methods, one would definitely want to know what lead the characters to choosing this format of action and if they experience any kind of moral struggle while doing what they are doing. Sadly, one gets none of it in “Primetime” but it remains a good and entertaining watch.

What was not a good and entertaining watch was Andrea Pallaoro’s “The Echo Chamber”. We are once again the victims of Italian quotas at the Mostra. The cast seemed promising though: Susan Sarandon, Alicia Vikander and Luca Marinelli. But with a bad story and “twist” that everyone expects since the first minutes but that only arrives late (when by then, everyone only wishes for the movie to be over), even a good cast cannot save the day.

I have to say that instead of watching closed doors and a street through a window for neverending minutes, I would have rather watched Susan Sarandon acting. A total disaster.

Based on that experience, we decided to stay for the last screening – just not to end the day with such a bummer. I am still not sure that it was a good idea as “Kvinde Ukendt” from Danish Egyptian film maker May El Toukhy, is an austere and classic production. It focuses on a maid about to marry the house master right after the end of WWII. Her war past seems however to be catching up with her and her secrets might put the upcoming marriage at risk.

Yes yes yes, we have seen this hundreds of times and I don’t think that this specific one adds anything special to the post-war movies already made. But we did stay until the end because the acting was good and it was still better than the previously screened disaster.