dThe 80th Venice International Film Festival officially got underway yesterday which saw, in addition to the opening of the contest with Commander by Edoardo De Angelis, the delivery of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to our Liliana Cavani. Very fresh 90 year old who received the award directly from the hands of Charlotte Rampling, unforgettable star of The night porter directed in 1974.
Liliana Cavani, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival 2023
“It was time!”. This is Claudia Gerini’s comment – protagonist of Cavani’s latest film The order of time – a few months after the news of the decision by Alberto Barbera, artistic director of the Exhibition, to reward the Modenese director. An acknowledgment therefore awaited by critics, colleagues and insiders and which Barbera justified in the press conference with these words.
«Liliana was one of the most emblematic protagonists of the new Italian cinema of the 1960s, with work later spanning over sixty years of show business history. A versatile artist capable of frequenting television, theater and opera with the same unconventional spirit, and the same intellectual restlessness that made her films famous. THEHis has always been a nonconformist thought, free from ideological preconceptions and free from conditioning of any kind».
Liliana Cavani with Charlotte Rampling, who awarded her the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. (Getty Images)
A life for cinema
Born in Carpi on 12 January 1933, Liliana Cavani is the daughter of a Mantuan architect and a housewife. It was she who made her passionate about her seventh art, accompanying her to the cinema from an early age. She graduated from the classical high school, Liliana then graduated in ancient literature at the University of Bologna in 1959 to then graduate from the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Rome with the short film The battle. Author of documentaries for Rai immediately after completing her studies, in 1966 he became famous thanks to the TV miniseries Francis of Assisiwhere the saint is played by Lou Castel, a symbol of the nonconformism of the time.
The film’s style is harsh and forceful, characterized by a language already tested in investigative documentaries, and the film achieved great success. Also unleashing many controversial reactions, including a parliamentary interpellation. Especially for the completely original way of representing the saint. In contrast to the Catholic dogmas of the time. In 1968 it was the turn of Galileo, a film in competition at the Venice Film Festival which focuses on the theme of the conflict between science and religion. Two years later, however, Liliana Cavani shoots The cannibalsa modern reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone which expresses with a particular language the conflict between mercy and law rooted in the social and political context of those years.
The scandal and the success of The night porter
Shot in Austria in 1973, the film focuses on an investigation into the ambiguous relationship that often develops between victim and perpetrator. Starring Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde, respectively as a Jewish concentration camp survivor and her Nazi tormentor Maximilian who, under a false name, works as a night porter in a hotel in Vienna. The two, in Vienna in the 1950s, meet by pure chance and resume their sadomasochistic relationship but Lucia in the meantime has become a dangerous witness that other Nazis want to get rid of. A story that, even today, triggers numerous controversies, primarily for breaking the mold of the traditional film story. Which generally does not admit that the protagonist could be a Nazi, a “hero” of evil.
Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling in a scene from “The Night Porter”. (IPA)
Considered scandalous in Italy, as in the rest of the world, The night porter it also investigates the ambiguity of human nature and the relationship between the Furher and his fanatical devotees. The film will then enter the collective imagination also for the “Nazi-chic” look by Rampling who, in some scenes, shows herself semi-naked with braces, long black leather gloves and a Nazi uniform hat. Great success at the box office, it will launch the international career of Cavani who, in the following years, in 1989 he will even direct Hollywood stars such as Mickey Rourke in a second adaptation of the life of St. Francis of Assisi.
From today in the room with The order of time
Throughout the seventies and eighties, the director continued to produce more or less controversial films. As beyond Good and Evil made in 1977 starring Dominique Sanda. A film that tells the dangerous and perverse love-philosophical triangle between the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the writer Paul Rée and the uninhibited writer and psychoanalyst Lou von Salomé. Titles like this will follow Skin And Berlin interior but no longer achieving the success of the past. And Liliana will thus choose to devote herself more to the theater than to the cinema. After a break of twenty years – her last film for the cinema was Ripley’s game with John Malkovich – Liliana Cavani is finally back in theaters with The order of time.
Based on the homonymous essay by Carlo Rovelli, tells the story of a group of old friends, who all meet together every year in a villa by the sea in Sabaudia to celebrate the birthday of one of them. During the celebrations, the party learns terrible news: the world as we know it could end in a matter of hours. The time that separates them from the apocalypse seems to pass differently, sometimes fast and sometimes eternal, as the group of friends faces its last hours on a summer night that will change their lives forever. In the cast Alessandro Gassmann, Claudia Gerini, Edoardo Leo, Ksenia Rappoport, and Valentina Cervi.
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