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.
It inspires a magazine spread that prompts the library’s owner to hire László to lead another far more ambitious project: the construction of a giant community center on a towering hill. Over the course of the next few years, it’s a grueling endeavor which enriches and then nearly destroys his life. We see it come together piece by piece—the concrete corridors, the austere chapel with a roof through which the sun shines just so, casting light in the shape of a cross onto its altar – and impressive though it is, it was still that library which remained permanently seared into my mind by the time the credits rolled. I wondered: would I ever be able to recreate something that serene at home?
There’s a similar modernist bent to the interiors in Pedro Almodóvar’s recent Venice premiere, The Room Next Door, too. This tale of two friends, Martha (Tilda Swinton) who is slowly dying and wishes to expedite the process, and Ingrid (Julianne Moore) a novelist whom she enlists to help her, is as ravishingly beautiful as everything else in the Spanish auteur’s oeuvre – every single set is meticulously designed and deserving of a closer look, from the bookshop where we first meet Ingrid to Martha’s hospital room. It’s the latter’s apartment, though, which had me going weak at the knees: its bright blue sofa, cherry-red side tables, orb-like lights, piles of coffee table books, Louise Bourgeois artwork, and various objets d’arts inspiring more envy than I can contain. (Ingrid’s apartment, which she’s temporarily borrowing from a friend and which everyone seems to consider a bit shabby, is also laughably gorgeous.)
Even more remarkable is the glass-walled, sharply-angled modernist gem in upstate New York to which they decamp in the film’s second half, the rented home in which Martha wishes to die. From its tranquil infinity pool to its pistachio-colored walls, bright red doors, bold canvases, angular sofas, and wall-to-wall views of the surrounding wilderness, its pleasures are endless. Martha and Ingrid’s favorite component? A pair of red and green sun loungers on the terrace, which seem to nod to the chairs in Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun which hangs just inside. Divine.
Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, another title competing for the Golden Lion, also has a keen eye for retina-searing color. The surreal account of a beleaguered American expat (Daniel Craig) who falls for a mysterious younger man (Drew Starkey) in ’50s Mexico City, it presents the former’s apartment as decidedly sordid, though when the pair head to South America, I found myself drooling over the interiors of their various motel rooms. During one fairly graphic sex scene, I remember eyeing up their bright green wrought iron headboard. Is there anywhere I could buy that?
I found myself similarly distracted in Pablo Larraín’s Maria. As Angelina Jolie’s formidable Maria Callas swanned around her extravagant Parisian apartment belting out arias, I was overwhelmed by the general splendor: the incredibly high ceilings and windows letting in a golden, almost otherworldly light; glossy, dark wood-paneled walls; twinkling chandeliers; a grand piano; priceless paintings; piles of hefty tomes; countless antique mirrors; miniature golden lamps jutting out from every corner; a collection of Roman busts; and a bed truly worthy of Marie Antoinette. It is every bit as lavish and thrillingly eccentric as its occupant.
While I know for certain that I will never live in a home as luxurious as that one, the problem with Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer, the new, Cate Blanchett-led Apple TV+ thriller which played out of competition at Venice, is that its setting feels not-quite-but-almost-kind-of attainable. The Oscar winner plays Catherine Ravenscroft, a respected journalist who occupies a jaw-dropping, split-level London home with her husband (Sacha Baron Cohen).
It isn’t huge—comprised of a sumptuous sitting area; a phenomenal, light-filled kitchen with a giant marble island, and two upstairs bedrooms—but it is totally dazzling. As the couple sips wine at that kitchen counter, surrounded by plants and bathed in lemony light from low-hanging lamps, prepare to add the room to your vision board. We later hear that the house has been something of a bone of contention—leaving their larger family home resulted in their troubled young adult son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) having to move out. Sorry, but if this is the outcome, I support it.
So, consider all of this a warning: watch these Venice releases at your peril—they’re guaranteed to have you redesigning your house stat.
