Guests dressed as brides arrive for the premiere yesterday of Io sto con la sposa during the 71st
annual Venice International Film Festival, in Venice. The movie is presented in the Orizzonti section at the festival that opened on August 27 and closes tomorrow.

 

By Alvise Armellini, DPA/Venice

 

A comeback movie by the director of cult 1980s film Gremlins, Joe Dante, entertained audiences at the Venice Film Festival yesterday, while a hotly-anticipated biopic of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini had a lukewarm reception.

US-born Dante’s new work is Burying the Ex, an indie horror-comedy about a young man whose overbearing girlfriend dies in a freak accident, but comes back to haunt him as a crazy zombie the night he hooks up with a new soulmate.

Presented out of competition, it got several laughs and warm applause at an advance screening for critics, ahead of its red carpet premiere.

It stars Ashley Greene from the Twilight series and Anton Yelchin from the latest Star Trek movies.

“No one has used a zombie to represent a psychotic ex who just won’t go away ... until now. Burying the Ex ... will prove once and for all that some relationships never die,” Dante, who did not show up in Venice, said in production notes.

Maverick US director Abel Ferrara – coming back from the flop of Welcome to New York, a thinly-veiled look at former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s sex assault case saga – was competing for the top Golden Lion award with Pasolini.

It starred US actor Willem Defoe as the gay writer, director and filmmaker who is seen as one of Italy’s greatest 20th century intellectuals, alongside an all-Italian cast including Pasolini’s real-life lover and chief actor Ninetto Davoli.

“I really just immersed myself in all things Pasolini,” Defoe said in a press conference. “I felt a responsibility to be in dialogue with the things that Pasolini wanted to make, his daily life and the things he was talking about.”

The film focused on Pasolini’s last hours before he was killed in 1975, after picking up a rent boy, in circumstances that have never been fully explained and that have been the subject of countless conspiracy theories.

Some have suggested that Pasolini was killed because he was working on an explosive material that could have rocked Italy’s establishment.

Ferrara shot his murder as the simple result of an assault by three homophobic thugs.

“There is no mystery in Pasolini’s death,” the director said in an interview with the festival’s daily bulletin. “No one in his family was too much surprised by what happened on the night of that November 2, 1975.”

At a critics’ screening, Pasolini was received with timid applause.

Unusually for the scandal-prone Ferrara, it was a rather conservative film, treating its subject matter with respect and sensitivity but failing to offer much new insights into Pasolini’s figure.

The film also suffered from its strange mix of Italian and English dialogues, mostly delivered by non-native speakers.

Red Amnesia by Chinese master Wang Xiaoshuai, the other Golden Lion contender on the festival’s daily menu, was received more enthusiastically by critics.

Red Amnesia is a psychological thriller centred around a widow whose behaviour during the Cultural Revolution comes back to haunt her in modern-day Beijing.

Venice hosts the world’s oldest film festival.

Today it is due to screen the last Golden Lion entry for this year, the US drone war drama Good Kill, starring Ethan Hawke, as well as the out-of-competition Faulkner adaptation The Sound and The Fury, directed by and starring James Franco.