Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone imagine a surreal Last Judgment in Venice.

VeniceThe Venice Film Festival brings back fond memories for the artistic duo of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and American actress Emma Stone. It was in the 2018 Exhibition that premiered The favorite, the film that inaugurated a long and fertile collaboration that, until now, has as its high point the Golden Lion that it took home Poor creatures in 2023. This Thursday the 82nd edition of the Italian competition hosted the world premiere of Bugonia, the fourth project shared by the director of Lobster and the protagonist of La La Land, which is actually a remake from the South Korean film Save the green planet! (2003). Jang Joon-hwan's film was a crazy, surreal pop delirium that played with the theory that the director of a large company could be the emissary of an alien race determined to eliminate the Earth. Now it is reinterpreted, urgently and in a refined way, by a Lanthimos who finds an ideal receptacle for his misanthropic gaze, his mastery of the scene and his taste for brutality.

The idea of transposing the violent odyssey of Save the green planet! –centered on the kidnapping of a top executive by two young outcasts– in America of the Present was by Ari Aster, but the director ofHereditary delegated the task of writing the script to Will Tracy and that of directing the film to Lanthimos. "The script of Bugonia "I found it funny and shocking," Lanthimos explained at his meeting with the press in Venice. "When I read it three years ago, I found it relevant, and today, unfortunately, it is even more so," he added about a film in which Emma Stone plays the role of the executive director and Jesse Plemons plays Jesse Plemons. What does it make of Bugonia A film so contemporary? Lanthimos, who usually plays with hermeticism when it comes to decoding his works, has shown himself more willing to interpret Bugonia"Many of the things we see in the film are real," he comments, referring to the hypocrisy of large corporations, the deep moral crisis in America, and the climate crisis. "Humanity is facing the moment of truth, its Final Judgment, and I don't know how much time we have if we think about artificial intelligence, the wars going on in the world, climate change... And the big problem is the denial of all this. We are losing the capacity to be outraged," he concludes in a serious tone. Kinds of kindness (2024).

Torture to the rhythm of Green Day

After two decades at the forefront of art-house cinema, we can conclude that Yorgos Lanthimos's films tend to lose their edge when they become too allegorical and when violence erupts arbitrarily. Fortunately, this is not the case with Bugonia, which, as it happened in The favorite, finds the crux of the plot in the theme of class struggle. Identifying the malaise and opportunism in the America that has turned Donald Trump into the most powerful man on the planet, Lanthimos orchestrates a savage tête à tête where it is difficult to draw moral lines. At the press conference, Stone defined Bugonia as a film that is "exciting, thrilling, very messed up, but also very alive." It should be added that the film, which connects with the acidic and cruel imagery of the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino, is genuinely American. Among other things, Bugonia It will be remembered for a torture scene, to the rhythm of the song Basket case by Green Day, which could share a place on the podium of cinematic sordidness along with the dance of death that starred the remembered Michael Madsen to Reservoir dogs.

George Clooney in Noah Baumbach's 'Jay Kelly'

The second day of the Mostra was completed with the premiere of Jay Kelly, by Noah Baumbach, the first of the three films with which Netflix hopes to win the Golden Lion (it will be accompanied by Frankenstein, by Guillermo del Toro, and In the House of Dynamite, by Kathryn Bigelow). Baumbach, a regular at the Showcase, proposes Jay Kelly A meditation on stardom in cinema, driven by the existential crisis suffered by a popular actor who, in his later years, questions his life choices. The film, which works better in its dramatic and intimate vein than in its more frenetic and comedic vein, is sustained by the tacit and friendly pact signed by Baumbach and Clooney. The director is committed to using irony with finesse, while the star dives headlong into self-parody, embodying an egomaniacal figure who has become accustomed to always being the center of attention. But, in the end, there's no doubt that this is a tribute, more explicit than veiled, to Clooney.