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In an industry that is reliant on the fickle vagaries of taste, film festivals exist to establish facts. The reason why film-makers still go through the rigmarole of ferrying their cast to the red carpets of Venice, Cannes or Sundance is the need for empirical evidence of unambiguous quality: a solid-gold prize, a top score on the critics’ grid, a record-timed standing ovation that will convince every doubter that this is a great film.
Film festivals, in turn, need beautiful A-listers to attract coverage and sponsorship, and hence there is a constant risk that these annual events become gigantic hype machines, in which every turkey is a classic and every half-hearted performance a masterclass.
Which is why there may not be a more important institution in world cinema than the Venice film festival’s Ridateci i soldi (“Give us our money back”): a makeshift chipboard wall erected next to the Palazzo del Cinema on which visitors are encouraged – with the blessing of the management – to scribble complaints and hatchet jobs in the most scathing terms possible.
The wall’s 30-year tradition commands that the festival’s director Alberto Barbera has to personally hand out a prize to the meanest diatribe, making Venice’s wall of shame a barrier against hype, an institutionalised pricking of the film world’s own pomposity.
On the Lido this year, there were complaints about the rising cost of entry badges, water taxis and local accommodation (“Maybe by 2030 we’ll have to pay for the oxygen we breathe”), queue lengths, uncomfortable seats and ceiling lights going on in the screening rooms.
Most of the notes dealt with the films themselves, however. There were protests against the inclusion of epic “Russian Oppenheimer” biopic DAU, notorious for reports of behind-the-scenes coercion and humiliation of cast and crew (“This is a disgusting, abusive (!!), pointless film!! Look it up!!!”), appeals to Trainspotting director Danny Boyle (“please make another movie about drugs”), insinuations about Paul Schrader’s child abuse drama The Basics of Philosophy so slanderous they cannot be repeated in print for risk of legal repercussions, and many a wordplay on the spoonerist title of Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard.
Italian titles in the lineup especially came in for drubbings, such as Andrea Pallaoro’s romantic drama The Echo Chamber, based on a script by Bernardo Bertolucci (“He will be turning in his grave”), Luca Guadagnino’s seven-hour documentary Joie de Vivre (“Arrest him!”), and Gerda Taro biopic The Girl with the Leica (“Insípido!”). It’s hard to imagine similarly buzz-killing language at Venice’s more po-faced competitors in Cannes or Berlin.
“Italian audiences always interact a little more with films,” says John Bleasdale, an Italy-based British critic and novelist. Just as popular actors or directors are often applauded as soon as their names appear in the credits, boos are considered a legitimate expression of taste, he argues. “The boos are vociferous, as is ironic laughter and applause. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin got booed at Venice, while other films split an audience and half of them boo while the others cheer.”
Ridateci i soldi was created in the late 90s by Gianni Ippoliti, a former football referee and TV presenter who acts as the prize’s one-man jury, in protest against reviews becoming overly enthusiastic. “If you read the reviews, you would believe that all 150 films shown at the festival this year are masterpieces,” he says as he stands guard at the festival’s wall of shame. “That’s not possible.”
The rules are flexible, he explains: “Of course people are also allowed to write something positive, but we find most of the time people who come out of the cinema want to vent their negative feelings.”
The Golden Lion, awarded to the winner of the 21 films in competition, is one of the most sought-after accolades in world cinema. But the Coppa Codacons – a wooden sculpture sponsored by Italy’s consumer watchdog and carved by artist Ferdinando Codognotto that is awarded to the most scathing comment – is the more beautiful object to put on your mantlepiece.
Festival visitor Cristian Poletti won the cup this year for a review in which he suggested a more suitable title for The Echo Chamber might have been “The Echo Bathroom” given how many scenes featured characters bathing. If Bertolucci really wrote the script for this movie, it said, perhaps it was intended to be a shampoo advert instead.
In spite of everything, Poletti says he remains a passionate fan of film festivals. In recent years there have been signs that Hollywood’s big studios are retreating from the festival circuit, aware that social-media campaigns can serve as more effective hype machines and that critical drubbings at Venice or Cannes can establish the wrong kind of irrefutable facts.
“I’ve been coming to Venice since 2015, and I always see 30 to 40 films,” says Poletti. “Even watching a bad movie is better than not watching a movie at all.”
