The Venice Film Festival has always been a place where beautiful things are appreciated—lest we forget, the storied showcase technically falls under the banner of the biennale, the annual celebration of art and architecture, among other creative disciplines. As a result, it should seem fitting that so many of the releases on this year’s starry line-up are awash with incredible, scene-stealing interiors—modernist marvels, high-ceilinged Parisian grandeur, and light-filled, open-planned spaces with rich, saturated color palettes which left me swooning. Still, after a week of screenings in the floating city, I was struck by just how many extraordinary rooms, pieces of furniture, and eye-popping pieces of art I remembered, in some cases, far more clearly than the films and TV shows themselves.
It only seems right to begin with The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s more-than-three-and-a-half-hour-long epic charting the life and career of the fictional Jewish-Hungarian émigré, Holocaust survivor and architect László Tóth (a career-best Adrien Brody), which, funnily enough, features an epilogue that takes us to the 1980 Venice architecture biennale, where our long-suffering hero is being honored with a retrospective. A character seemingly inspired by the likes of Marcel Breuer and Louis Kahn, this free-thinking pioneer first arrives in the US some three decades before then, joining his cousin (Alessandro Nivola) in Philadelphia, where he owns a modest furniture store. When the former asks for his opinion on the stuffy, decidedly old-school pieces he’s selling, László looks around and admits, “It’s not very beautiful.”
He swiftly changes that. In one stunning sequence, we see him sketch out and construct an impossibly sleek cantilever chair. Placed in the shop window alongside a matching table, it looks glorious—and shockingly ahead of its time.
The same can be said of his first major commission: the son of an industrialist (Joe Alwyn) requests a new library as a surprise for his father (Guy Pearce). A room cluttered with dark wood furniture and lined with deep red curtains is then transformed in spectacular fashion: curved shelves are constructed, effectively hiding the books along the circular walls; the staggeringly tall windows exposed to let in more light (though still covered with air-light cotton to protect the books from the sun); and a single reclining, mid-century-style chair placed in the center of the room. The starkness and almost monastic modernity of it is incredible.