Who is popular today?

Call Me By Your name director Luca Guadagnino serves up some fine young cannibals, Cate Blanchett dazzles in a musical tour de force, and Call My Agent!’s Laure Calamy is full of surprisesVenice has a reputation as the easy A-list festival – the one that comes as a gentle package of calm and Campari by contrast with the agitation of Cannes. Well, the calm may yet settle upon us, but it’ll take a day or two for the stress to wear off. During the lockdown years, Venice managed to subsist in very sturdy form by introducing a ticketing system partly designed to maintain social distancing and it pretty much worked fine. Last Sunday morning, though, a new online ticket system raised public and press hackles by putting delegates through a baffling e-labyrinth of queues and dead ends for more than five hours. Once people actually arrived in the city, greeted by a Wednesday morning downpour, followed by a blast of blistering sun, we all felt we’d been put through a special circle of Dante’s hell reserved for jaded cinephiles.Just as well, then, that the festival got off to a juicy start. It kicked off with writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose Marriage Story was one of Venice’s most popular hits in recent years. His competition opener, White Noise, however, isn’t nearly as gratifying. Adapted from Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, it’s set in a fictional university town. Adam Driver plays a lecturer in Hitler studies who takes shelter with his wife (Greta Gerwig) and kids after a chemical calamity sends their community into a chaotic evacuation. Don Cheadle plays a fellow academic, the resident dispenser of enigmatic cultural aperçus and a specialist in the meaning of the great American car crash. This is a wordy, enigmatic and visually stylised number, with Driver delivering his non-sequitur one-liners with wry aplomb, and there’s a definite tang of Robert Altman to the frenetic stylisation, but it’s never entirely clear quite what the film is for. It’s pitched as a period piece, a post-postmodernist take on the glacial irony of DeLillo’s style, but its manic ironies are an awkward translation of the chilly detachment of the original. Still, if you’re of the 1980s generation that looked to Devo videos for philosophical statements on consumerist alienation, you may get a nostalgic frisson. Continue reading...