Venice Film Festival: Bradley Cooper shines with “Maestro” and Roman Polanski disappoints

The acclaimed began Venice International Film Festival with compliments for American actor and director Bradley Cooperwho managed through a great physical resemblance to resurrect the composer leonard bernstein in his film biography “Teacher”. In contrast, the disastrous presentation of the last work of Roman Polanski took all the criticism.

Multi-awarded in 2019 for “A star is born”, Cooper is an actor who has managed to maintain an unusual balance in Hollywood between his acting career of box office hits (“The Sniper”, “What Happened Yesterday?”) and author works such as “Maestro”, co-produced with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. the francopolish Roman Polanski90 years old, for his part returned to Venice with a Vaudeville filmed in a Swiss hotel, “The Palace”with old glories of the seventh art.

Neither Cooper nor Polanski were present. on the lido. The American director, because of the actors strike in hollywoodwhile Polanski, that lives in switzerland go on under threat of judicial extradition in the United States for the rape of a minor in 1977.

Author of hits like “West Side Story,” Bernstein was the great American hope of entering the Olympus of classical music, but also a genius with a complicated sentimental life. Although he was married to actress Felicia Montealegreraised in Chile, Bernstein had relationships with men throughout his entire life, which endangered his family life.

The film directly addresses those relationships and the tensionsnot only with his wife (played by Carey Mulligan), but with their children, who never found out the truth, Bernstein’s eldest daughter, Jamie, revealed at a press conference on the Lido. “I don’t know why my father denied everything,” Jamie explained., which in 2018 published a memoir that partly inspired Bradley Cooper. “It was a long process for all of us, testing and confusing,” she admitted, enthusing about the film. “We never thought Bradley would go to such lengths to maintain authenticity.” of the character, he explained. “It’s actually a love story, that of our parents,” she added.

Polanski didn’t have to leave Switzerland to shoot “The Palace”, filmed in the alpine station of Gstaad, with Mickey Rourke, Fanny Ardant and John Cleese (of the British group Monty Python). In Venice, the film was presented out of competition and It was a critical failure.

This old-fashioned farce set in 1999 rIt received very negative reviews, with one from Variety calling it a “laugh-free debacle”.. Several critics admitted to being especially hard on the director for political reasons, though they insisted that it is easily the worst film of his career.

Polanski has lived in Europe for more than four decades after disobeying a summons from the US court. The multi-award winning filmmaker, who won an Oscar for “The Pianist” and “The Devil’s Baby”, lives a situation similar to that of Woody Allen, who also premieres a film in Venice out of competition, but who will not be present at the Lido to defend it either.

“It has been very difficult to make this film,” explained the producer, Luca Barbareschi.at a press conference. Polanski could not count on French financing, nor on American platformss, which instead keep the filmmaker’s old films in their repertoire, criticized Barbareschi. Those feature films, movie classics, “bring them millions,” he declared. “Why don’t they produce the new movie?” the producer wondered.