Tuesday, August 30 – Sunday, September 11

We stayed in Venice for almost two weeks, doing pretty much the same things each day: breakfast in our hotel, going to see a couple films on Lido, then finding some place to eat dinner. So we’ll just list the films we saw, and the interesting places we ate. The Art Biennale was also happening, and we spent a few days looking at that.

Lindsay and Kevin were also in Venice the first few days we were there, and we ate and saw art with them. We also introduced them to Ray’s cousin Johan, who we spent time with the whole time we were there.

We stayed at the same place we’ve stayed for the last several visits, Guesthouse Ca’ dell’ Angelo, not far from San Marco. We got there a day earlier than our reservation, but fortunately the room was available. At the end we tried to extend a day longer, but unfortunately we couldn’t, so we moved to a shared airbnb apartment a little closer to the train station. We had the usual airbnb hassle of getting the key, and ultimately it was the simultaneous arrival of some other guests which allowed us to enter the building.

Films

• Tár – Cate Blanchett gives a dynamic performance as an orchestra conductor.  (And she won the Best Actress award!)  The orchestra gives dynamic performances as well.  See it!
• Bardo – Iñärittu presents a self-indulgent beautifully shot semi-autobiographical film that goes on and on and on for three hours.  There is not any branch of Buddhism which places antarabhāva in a sequences of Mexican and American parties.  Also, editing your own film should be illegal.
• Like Turtles – A delightful film about a wife’s response to her husband leaving her — she goes into the emptied wardrobe and doesn’t leave.  Her children, her daughter’s boyfriend, and her mother take turns visiting her there.
• Pinned Into a Dress – A short about a drag performer and the pains of fashion.
• Three Nights a Week – A photographer who’s drifting away from his girlfriend meets a drag performer, and falls for his out-of-drag persona.
• A Compassionate Spy – A documentary about Ted Hall, who as an 18-year-old brilliant physicist working on the Manhattan Project, realizes that the plans need to be shared with the Soviets in order to preserve world peace, and shares them without suffering any legal repercussions.  At the line “we could have murdered someone”, Ray and I turned to each other and simultaneously said “on Fifth Avenue”.
• The Happiest Man in the World – Also based on a true story, a woman at a speed-dating event in Sarajevo is matched with the soldier who shot her in 1993, when she was 16 and he was 17.  Chaos ensues.  What do the dating apps do about avoiding matches between Pink Pussy and MAGA hats?
• Branded to Kill – A restored yakuza movie from 1967.  Hitman #3 wants to become hitman #1, but is instead hunted by him.  Basically a comedy, bodies falling everywhere.  (Won a Orizzonti award).  Style above all.  Makes Sean Connery look like Jed Clampett, shot with a 20 million yen budget.
• Puiet – A short, with a kid wandering around in a field.  Would benefit from a plot.
• Eismayer – The true story of an Austrian drill sergeant, with a wife and kid, who falls in love with one of his recruits and slowly comes out.  They are joined in a civil union.  Apparently Austria is not a place that cares about fraternization between ranks, never mind the gender.
• Music for Black Pigeons – A documentary about the Danish guitarist Jakob Bro and the musicians he has performed with.  Ethereal ECM music throughout, and interviews with each of them sharing their thoughts on what making music is about, which results in little useful and sometimes prolonged silences.  Cousin Johan commented, “Asking a musician to explain in words how it feels to make music, is like handing a writer a guitar.”
• Reginetta – A short about a woman who is told she could be a beauty queen.  Her family subjects her to tortures to make her more beautiful in their quest to share in her winnings.  The long version may be found in Pasolini’s Salò, where families also fall all over themselves for their kids to win the honor of being given to fascists to kill.  I’ll bet the same dynamic was happening with the child mummies of Llullaillaco.
• Skin Deep – A sci-fi film where people go to an island and swap bodies, and sometimes partners.  Requires a lot of suspension of disbelief.  It is the worst sort of film, every character dragged around by his feet in service of the auteur’s set-pieces.  We don’t need no stinkin’ motivation?  At the end, a straight cis white guy completely out of the blue becomes a woman because his girlfriend has decided she likes being a man.  Writers don’t get to reinvent human responses the way they can introduce surrealist nonsense into objective reality.  Suremotionism doesn’t fly.  Maybe in porn, or other specialized Christian or Communist propaganda.  If a rifle is to be used in Act III, it ought to at least cast a shadow on the wall in Act I.
• World War III – A comic romp from Iraq about a peasant who gets a gig as a security guard at a filming.  Then he becomes an extra, a prisoner in a concentration camp.  Then he is promoted to play Hitler.  Meanwhile, he’s being extorted to “save” a woman he met in a brothel.  Chaos ensues.  (The actor won Best Actor in the Orrizonti competition, and the film won Best Film.)
• Luxembourg, Luxembourg – Another comic romp featuring two twin actors playing two twin characters in Ukraine.  One is a drug dealer / bus driver, the other is a cop.  They get a phone call that their dad is gravely ill in Luxembourg, and go up there to see him.  Chaos ensues throughout.
• The Matchmaker – An interesting documentary about a woman accused of recruiting other women to join the Islamic State.  She is awaiting trial in France.
• Hanging Gardens – A cute film about two kids who discover a sex doll in the trash heaps of Baghdad, and sell timeslots with her to local men.  The cuteness is tempered by the fact that they live in a horrific Islamic theocracy.
• No Bears – A film from Jafar Panahi, an Iranian filmmaker who is not allowed to make films, about him making a film from a village close to the Turkish border.  (These days all of his films are about restrictions on his making films.) The actual filming is happening on the Turkish side, though he is attempting to direct from the Iran side.  The poor connection is the least of his problems.  It won a Special Jury award.
• Closing Ceremonies:  Awards – This festival takes place in Venice, so you can understand that things are in Italian.  But it also features films from all over the world, and attracts filmmakers and actors from all over as well, as well as international tourists like us.  So all of the films have Italian and English subtitles — an extra subtitle screen is located beneath the main screen.  The awards ceremony takes place in the Sala Grande, the grandest permanent cinema used by the Festival.  And there is a large temporary theater, the Pala Biennale, built on the local rugby track, which for the awards was used as an “overflow” theater.  While the introduction of the awards had English subtitles transcribed onto the screen at the Sala Grande, those were not shown in the Pala Biennale.  The most offensive thing about the presentation was that when an award winner gave his/her acceptance speech in English, there was a much louder simultaneous translation in Italian which completely drowned out the English, creating essentially music.  There were a couple winners we will have to make an effort to see, including the French film Saint Omer, and the Best Picture winner All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary about the life of Nan Goldin directed by Laura Poitras (which will be on HBO).
• The Hanging Sun – Based on a Jo Nesbo thriller (yet more macho religious fundamentalists mistreating women and children), this one a Western (mysterious loner shows up in small town) set on the coast of Norway, except, an imaginary country.  The son refuses to carry out a hit directed by his father seeks refuge in a remote village.  The frustrated woman likes that her son likes him, but Carrozzini lacks the balls to go full Lolita on the topic.  The Puritans have once again ousted the Elizabethans.  The 2nd of September was the 380th anniversary of the closing of the theaters.
• Best Director – We could have seen Bones and All, a cannibalism comedy directed by Luca Guadagnino, winner of the Best Director award, but we decided we’d rather go eat dinner.  Even at that, places were closing and we found one that somewhat reluctantly served us.  We will be able to stream it before long.

Food Highlights

• Impronta – Picked for its proximity to the route from the train station to our hotel, it turned out to have interesting food.  We shared an appetizer with five little mounds of various delicious seafood preparations.  It was nice eating with Lindsay and Kevin, and having the opportunity to rotate four plates between four people, a first since the pandemic:  a goose leg, black pasta with cuttlefish, another seasonal pasta, and a barley dish.  The barley dish and the dessert both had tasty hints of licorice.  And some amaros after dinner.
• Trattoria Anzolo Rafaelle – This is way off the beaten path in the western part of Dorsoduro.  Though Google identifies it as “Friuilan”, it seems much more Sardinian.  We had rabbit with a delicious sauce, and an ethereally delightful pear/ricotta cake for dessert.  La Ciccia in San Francisco was also the result of a marriage between a Sardinian chef and a headwaitress from Veneto.
• Trattoria Andri – We returned to this place on Lido, totally focused on seafood.  We ordered the mantis shrimp appetizer:  those little things have an entirely different shell structure from any crustacean we’ve eaten.  Also, an expertly prepared “orata”, which they translated as gilt-fish, but I’ve heard “dorado” more frequently.  And a cake with pistachio cream and whipped cream, served with an enormous bottle of blueberry grappa.
• Africa Experience – Our chance to have something non-Italian, basically curries and rice, which really could have been heated up a little more.  The wine from Stellenbosch near Cape Town was quite good, perhaps the best bottle we had in Venice.
• Majer – A coworker sent me a list of places he likes to eat in Venice, and we went to a few of them.  One of them was on the island of Giudecca, but when we got there we discovered the place did not serve evening meals.  But right next to it was Majer, a nice restaurant (which featured specially raised beef we didn’t get).  It was located right on the dock and had a beautiful view of the Dorsoduro shore opposite.  After a delightful charred artichoke amuse bouche, we had scallops served on their shell with a slice of truffle, and then big raviolis filled with lamb.  And as we left, we had breakfast a Majer bakery (the Majer empire started in 1924 as a bakery).  It serves pastries in the morning, and pizzas later in the day.  Too bad we can’t eat everything everywhere.
• Vino Vero – Always excellent cicchetti, always excellent natural wine.  Ray & Lindsay went once, Ray and I went once.  Talked at length to another customer, who was in Venice looking for films to schedule for her theater in a small town in Germany.  We aren’t outgoing enough to have many of these conversations.
• Corner Pub – If you’re outgoing enough to chat with college students doing a year abroad as legaly drinking adults, this is the place to go.  Ali, the bartender, almost never allows us to pay for drinks.  I suppose he must have a crush on Johan.  Everyone else does.
• All The Other Nights – We ate at a variety of places, with appetizers like prosciutto and melon, artichoke bottoms, mixed salads, main courses like lasagnas, pizzas, osso buco, and always wine.

Art

This year we were able to see the Biennale Arte with our friends Lindsay and Kevin, one day at Arsenale, and another day at Giardini.  Both venues had tons of interesting paintings, sculpture, and videos.  We didn’t really have much time to see other exhibits around town, though we got to a few.

Arsenale

• big cubes of earth made with spices like cinnamon and cloves, except the aromas had mostly faded by September.
• Colorful reproductions of some 1704 drawings of plants
• Fiery drops of molten steel dropping into pools of water (the Malta pavilion)
• A display of ceramic knick-knacks, many displaying genitalia (the Latvia pavilion)

Giardini

• Monumental sculptures at the US pavilion
• 110 dB guitar player gazing at his shoes at the Australian pavilion.  Not sure what point they were making.
• An exhibit of common expressions involving body parts, many of which aren’t common in English (the Brazil pavilion)
• Stuffed dead centaurs (the Danish pavilion) in nearly realistic style.
• Slow-moving complicated analog computers (the Korean pavilion).
• In the Sami pavilion, I met a woman who photographs people who look like the art they are standing next to.  She airdropped me her photo.