Venice/Venice (1992)
Review by Dindrane
Film:
DVD:

Written by Henry Jaglom
Directed by Henry Jaglom
Starring Nelly Alard, Henry Jaglom, Suzanne Bertish, Diane Salinger, David Duchovny, Melissa Leo, Daphna Kastner

Features:

• Filmographies
  
• Running audio commentary by writer/director Jaglom
  
• Trailers
  

Released by: Rainbow Films/Wellspring
Region: 1
Rating: R
Anamorphic: Yes

My Advice: Rent it if you’re interested in film or the nature of reality. Otherwise, skip it.

Venice/Venice is a film with a message--the line between reality and fiction is very thin, even blurred or non-existent. We watch as a young French journalist travels to Venice, Italy to interview a gifted film director. She finds him very different than she had assumed from viewing his films, more shallow, less idealized, and yet of course she falls in love with him. The rest of the film is a working out of their relationship and the oddities that fill his life.

The characters are at the same time both complex and shallow. They live very strange lives and make decisions that are never quite explained to the audience, making this film less of a coherent narrative and more of an experiment in storytelling without connective tissue, turning the viewers into guinea pigs of sorts. The actors don’t seem to have a good handle on their characters either; one minute you like them, and the next minute, they seem to be floundering or just ringing false.

The theme of the movie overpowers the action and the characterization. At first, as Our Heroine struggles to reconcile her fantasies with reality, it seems as if the director is saying that fiction and reality are split. Later, the film seems to show that fiction and reality are potentially the same thing, that past and present are one, and that multiple things can be true at once. Basically, the film tells us what most of us already know: that reality is a very slippery thing. Too bad the film doesn’t teach us this in a very interesting or even entertaining way.

The problem with this film is that the execution didn’t quite live up to the premise. The frequent talking heads serve to break up the action in a way that not only distances viewers from the action, as no doubt the director intended, but to irritate and make everything hang together less perfectly. Additionally, the actors are frequently rather wooden and not truly interested in their roles--again, this could be seen as “life-like”, as people are often not interested in their lives, but instead here just seems as if the director couldn’t find good actors. The filming is even a bit less than creative; cinematographers should push the “real vision quotient” only so far, and actually try to center the actors from time to time or maybe capture something attractive, emotionally moving, or interesting in the shot. The film just plain fails to capture the imagination and interest of viewers very well, and therefore any high concept it might have had gets lost. If you get the theme of the film within the first few scenes, then you really don’t need to watch the rest of the movie--if you get it, you get it. If you don’t, then you won’t care about the rest, and it isn’t interesting in any ways other than its theme.

Unfortunately, Jaglom’s commentary does little to fill in any holes that the movie leaves. His discussions are often more interesting than the movie itself, but don’t really do much to explain some of his choices. The features list also includes the usual filmographies and trailers.

In short, we have here a high concept film that is rather too enamored of its own cleverness. It could have been a great film, but just isn’t. It’s still interesting and worth a view, but I don’t think anyone will need to watch it more than once; the message of the interplay between reality and fiction can be internalized within the first twenty minutes of the film and really doesn’t need to be repeated, and indeed isn’t significantly developed after that point. Besides, there is just very little here to engage the emotions or intellect of the viewers below surface level. Basically, this one was almost brilliant, but just not there.