Venice Review: Trace Lysette In Andrea Pallaoro’s ‘Monica’

A disparate group of characters collide in Dry (Siccita), a semi-apocalyptic drama premiering out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Paolo Virzi directs this glossy portmanteau film that assembles a strong cast for overlapping storylines and satirical social comment. 

A Syrian war film with a difference, Nezouh is a delicate and engrossing entry in Venice’s Horizons Extra section. Director Soudade Kaadan won Lion of the Future for 2018’s The Day I Lost My Shadow, and she continues to impress with this empathetic story of life under siege. 

Every film Jafar Panahi makes is an act of resistance. Currently in jail, the Iranian director has spent the past 12 years in and out of house arrest, banned from traveling or making films outside Iran and faced with numerous obstacles making films at home. That hasn’t stopped him.

In his acting life, Steve Buscemi has certainly mixed things up, finding time for Bruckheimer/Simpson blockbusters, Pixar animation and even Adam Sandler movies in a bid to avoid typecasting as the definitive New York indie guy. In his directing career, however, he tends to stick to a certain genre: small, intimate, personal films like his excellent 1996 debut Trees Lounge, which told the story of a melancholic underachiever whose life revolves around a seedy dive bar where the crowd of misfit regulars become his bizarre de facto family. Loneliness is a familiar motif in Buscemi’s work, and he excelled himself with that in 2005’s Lonesome Jim, starring Casey Affleck as a young man who’s failed in the big city and now has to move in with his parents.

Surprisingly, Nuclear is not one of Oliver Stone’s “devil’s advocate” documentaries, the spate of films he started making in the early 2000s that seemed to troll liberals everywhere by spending time with notorious human-rights abusers such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. In the real world right now, nuclear power is about as toxic as those three men put together, but this intelligent and surprising film is an investigation into how that PR damage came about, which makes it arguably more of a piece with his famous conspiracy thriller JFK than any of those. At nearly two hours, it’s a hard watch, being dominated by Stone’s dense, monotonous voice-over and featuring scientists with next to no screen presence (this explains a lot about Adam McKay’s decision to shoot Don’t Look Up with A-listers). Nevertheless, it puts forward a lot of unexpected proposals about nuclear energy, debunking powerful myths along the way.

Forget Seberg, forget Mank, forget Judy — Andrew Dominik’s Venice Film Festival competition entry Blonde takes a blowtorch to the entire concept of the Hollywood biopic and arrives at something almost without precedent.

A powerful meditation on recent history, In Viaggio premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by previous Golden Lion winner Gianfranco Rosi, it follows the travels of Pope Francis, using mostly archival footage to paint not just a picture of the man, but of the modern world.

An eccentric 20-something tries to make friends in Amanda, a first feature for Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli. Premiering in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, it’s a comical, stylized character portrait with a strong central turn from Benedetta Porcaroli. 

I never start a review commenting on whatever the so-called Film Twitter Mafia have to say about it, sight unseen. Starting back at CinemaCon in April when its directo/co-star Olivia Wilde was served legal papers onstage regarding her custody hearings with ex Jason Sudeikis, there has been non-stop gossip about her movie Don’t Worry Darling. There has been so much of it, right up to today’s Venice Film Festival press conference (covered by my colleague Nancy Tartaglione) that you almost have to address the elephant in the room. Others can do that, but let us not forget there is also a movie here, one I was able to preview as just that a few weeks ago in Burbank. As a reviewer, to quote Being There’s Chauncey Gardner, “I like to watch,” and that means only what is on the screen.

Playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh is up to more deliciously fiendish tricks in The Banshees of Inisherin, a simple and diabolical tale of a friendship’s end shot through with bristling humor and sudden moments of startling violence. It world premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival Monday. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and the small handful of supporting players make the most of the author’s vibrant prose in McDonagh’s first film since Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri five years ago.

Wolf and Dog (Lobo e Cão) is the first feature film by Portuguese director Claudia Varejão. The movie follows a group of queer teenagers growing up in the uber-religious town of San Miguel in the Azores who yearn for more than the small-town ideals and the mundane lifestyle of their parents. Written by Varejão and Leda Cartum, the central characters try to build a community of their own. Still, the adults want the kids to remain stagnant, become farmers, fishermen, or mothers, and force them to enjoy that lifestyle. The movie has challenging moments to get through because they slow the pacing, making it a more tedious viewing experience, but the script works hard to subvert some harmful tropes.

Director Cristina Grosan’s Ordinary Failures (Bezna Selhani) follows three people dealing with everyday problems against the backdrop of impending doom. Written by Klára Vlasáková, is about getting out of your head and experiencing the world in the present before it passes you by (or no longer exists). At first, the plot is confusing, but it eventually comes together in a satisfying (yet bleak) way.

Even before the title flashes up for Venice Film Festival competition entry L’Immensita, we know that Penelope Cruz is the most fun mom – most likely the only fun mom – in town. She doesn’t just set the table for dinner; she puts on music, leads the kids in a choreographed dance and singalong as they pass plates and cutlery, emoting into a passing fork as if it were a microphone. Adults bore her. At a birthday dinner for an ancient relative, she slips under the table to join her children in removing and mixing up everyone’s shoes. “I want to play!” she says, eyes gleaming.

Who would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky? His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.

Trace Lysette arrives at the premiere of her new film Monica at the 2022 Venice Film Festival on Saturday (September 3) in Venice, Italy.

A lesbian gym teacher navigates Margaret Thatcher’s Britain under the “Section 28” law in Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley’s debut feature premiering in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival.

Andrea Pallaoro’s “Monica” is oblique in its depiction of characters in crisis, yet never obtuse. He and cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi shoot the film in the boxier Academy ratio, locking the film into a nearly permanent state of portraiture.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Over the course of three quietly devastating features, Italian-born, America-based art-house director Andrea Pallaoro (“Medeas,” “Hannah”) has shown just how inadequate words can be when it comes to expressing some of life’s most complicated emotions. In his latest, “Monica,” Pallaoro takes on the near-universal craving for parent-child connection, knowing full well that his two lead characters — a Midwestern trans woman and the uncomprehending mom who rejected her — won’t be able to say what one another most needs to hear. But that doesn’t mean they can’t reach some kind of unspoken understanding, recognizable to those with experience reading between the lines.

When Trace Lysette got to Venice for the premiere of the Andrea Pallaoro-directed drama Monica, she learned that she becomes the first Trans actress to headline a competition film here. Lysette plays the title character, a Trans woman who comes home to care for the mother who rejected her years ago, The young woman has a lot of personal issues she is working through, but among the most frustrating is that the mental faculties of her mother (Patricia Clarkson) are failing along with her health. She doesn’t recognize her child, and Monica tries her best to build a bond as her caretaker. Lysette was a regular in the Amazon series Transparent, and she co-starred with Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu in Hustlers. But this is her first leading role in a movie. We met at the Excelsior hotel for a Disruptors party thrown by Deadline, Thelios and Guillotine Vodka. It is clear that setting a milestone in Venice is not something Lysette takes lightly.