46/15
Do We Need the Venice Film Festival?
Scenario
When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are forever changed by a wealthy and mysterious client. IMDb Editor Arno Kazarian offers quick thoughts on 12 films that screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival, including Anora and the dangerous and curiously erotic Mercy. Laszlo Toth was also the name of the man who defaced Michelangelo’s statue, La Pietà, with a hammer. (2024).
Brutalist is full of surprises
The characters aren’t what you expect, not in the way that the Scooby Doo ending does, but in the subtler, incremental way that real people reveal themselves: unfolding over time, in a new context, or when forced by circumstance. Here the circumstance is postwar horror. Adrien Brody’s Laszlo, a Jewish architect who has escaped the clutches of bloody Europe, throws himself or is confronted by the welcoming arms of America in a frenetic opening sequence that evokes the literal birth of the Statue of Liberty. His journey becomes one of perpetual navigation between life’s various horrors: existential, professional, familial, intimate, without ever taking his eyes off the prize of great achievement and without ever appreciating the value of that prize in the first place.
What is the lesson?
Is it the shameful discovery that his success came not in spite of the trauma but because of it? Do we owe a debt to abuse? To the forces of culture, country, power and those who wield it, in the construction of our brutal legacies? Or must we build resentment in its shadow?
But there is no romance
Are our lives the gasoline burned on the way to somewhere more meaningful? The film is charming, engaging and not at all boring (did you hear it’s long?). It seems to be based on an old novel, a mysterious book that I would love to explore for some of the details that the film refuses to share. This old man’s search for meaning becomes ours as well.
And any greater understanding of Lazslo’s arrival, the machinations of his family, his country and his uprooting, for better or worse, seems to be our responsibility
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