‘Pigeon’ flies away with top award
Print Edition
SWEDISH director Roy Andersson has won the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion for his absurdist drama “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.”
The festival’s other avian contender, the widely praised Michael Keaton comeback movie “Birdman,” went home empty-handed, but still looks set to be an awards-season contender.
Andersson’s series of bleakly comic vignettes — imagine Monty Python directed by Ingmar Bergman — had some critics in raptures but left others scratching their heads. Set in a drab modern Sweden with occasional bursts of surrealism and song, “Pigeon” loosely follows two sad-sacks trying unsuccessfully to sell vampire teeth and other jokey novelties.
Andersson, 71, said earlier last week that his goal was to find poetry in the banal. Accepting his award, the director said Italian films — especially Vittorio de Sica's neorealist masterpiece “Bicycle Thieves” — had a major impact on him.
“You have such a fantastic film history,” he told his Italian hosts.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful documentary about the legacy of Indonesian massacres, “The Look of Silence,” won the runner-up award, the Grand Jury Prize.
The festival’s Silver Lion for best director went to Russia's Andrei Konchalovksy for “The Postman's White Nights,” a largely silent drama set among villagers on a remote island.
Rising Hollywood star Adam Driver and Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher took the acting prizes for playing a couple whose transition to parenthood goes chillingly wrong in “Hungry Hearts.”
The festival jury gave a screenplay award to Iranian director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tehran-set “Tales,” and a special prize to Turkish director Kaan Mujdeci for “Sivas,” a drama about a neglected boy’s bond with a fighting dog.
Two of the most talked-about performances were by actors playing men battered by life. Al Pacino was a small-town Texas locksmith trapped in the past in David Gordon Green's “Manglehorn.”
And Keaton used memories of his “Batman” years to brilliant effect as an aging actor trying to regain his spark in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's satirical “Birdman.”
Juror Tim Roth said “Birdman” was a good film that just didn’t make the cut in the jury’s deliberations.
But, the actor said, “there is nothing better than seeing Michael Keaton coming and kicking some ass.”
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