Top 5 Most Anticipated Venice 2022 Premieres
By Nicholas Bell | Published on August 23, 2022
As the 79th Venice Film Festival is set to commence next week, with Julianne Moore serving as jury president, there's a lot to be excited for at the Lido. More than ever before, the fall festival circuit has yielded some distinctive programming choices, with festivals divvying up world premieres without the generous overlap historically evident at TIFF (where several high profile Venice titles aren't playing). While TIFF, Telluride, NYFF and San Sebastian each have absorbed some of the year's most anticipated titles, the latest edition of Venice proves to be the gold standard line-up. Famed documentarians, a handful of women (the Venice competition usually falls even behind Cannes in gender parity), and the throb of Netflix arthouse productions, which are still forced to sidestep the Croisette, makes for an exciting European pu pu platter of delights. Here's a glance at our top 5 most anticipated titles in the program.
5. Blonde - Dir. Andrew Dominik
At a running time of 166 minutes, Andrew Dominik's Blonde isn't actually an anomaly in a sea of lengthy new features in the competition. But for any who've read Joyce Carol Oates' captivating 2000 fictional memoir on Marilyn Monroe, this promises to be a faithful reckoning with her somber odyssey into the icon's tragedies. Dominik, whose last narrative feature was 2012's Killing Me Softly, has been attempting to get the project off the ground since 2011, initially put on the back burner, with various actors pegged to play Monroe throughout the years (Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain were both initially mentioned). Dominik's NC-17 rated endeavor stars Ana de Armas and will play at the tail end of the competition, likely as divisive and difficult as its grueling creative gestation deserves.
4. The Eternal Daughter - Dir. Joanna Hogg
Joanna Hogg finally shot to the international acclaim she deserved with the Sundance premiere The Souvenir (2019), and its follow-up, The Souvenir: Part II (2021), which went to the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes. While both those semi-autobiographical projects were led by Honor Swinton Byrne, with her real life mum Tilda Swinton featured as a supporting character, Hogg secretly made The Eternal Daughter during the pandemic, reuniting once again with Swinton (who headlined Hogg's 1986 short film Caprice, as well). One of the shortest films to play in the competition, it's a ghost story about a mother and daughter returning to a dilapidated family manor. Also, Martin Scorese returns for the third time as EP for Hogg.
3. Monica - Dir. Andrea Pallaoro
One of the Italian cinema's most exciting new auteurs, Andrea Pallaoro's sophomore film Hannah (2017) won Charlotte Rampling the Volpi Cup for Best Actress in Venice. He returns for the second part of the planned thematic trilogy featuring a female lead with Monica, starring Trace Lysette as a trans woman who travels to visit with her estranged dying mother, played by Patricia Clarkson.
2. The Sitting Duck - Dir. Jean-Paul Salome
Another film festival usually means another Isabelle Huppert film. Premiering in the Orrizonti (Horizons) sidebar is The Sitting Duck, reuniting Huppert with her Mama Weed (2020) director, Jean-Paul Salome. Described as a European Erin Brockovich, Huppert is a whistleblower who has no memory of a vicious assault she survives. Set in the world of nuclear power and politics, this promises to be a stark contrast from the tone of the last union between star and director. Marina Fois co-stars.
1. Master Gardener - Dir. Paul Schrader
And our most anticipated title premiering at the 2022 Venice Film Festival is Master Gardener, the third in a thematic trilogy from Paul Schrader, following the exceptional First Reformed (2017) and last year's The Card Counter. Schrader is being presented with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the festival, which relegates his latest to an out-of-competition slot. The New Orleans set feature (which was also the backdrop for his 1982 Cat People remake) also reunites Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton (who played mother and son in the underwhelming Ridley Scott epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, 2014). Weaver is a wealthy dowager and Edgerton is the horticulturalist tending her garden (pun likely intended). When her niece suddenly arrives, he's forced to mentor the younger woman. Schrader has described the film as imagining if the Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd characters from Taxi Driver were able to sit down together.