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Ang Lee gets second Golden Lion at Venice festival
2007-09-08
Taiwanese director Ang Lee picked up his second Golden Lion for best picture at the Venice film festival on Saturday for his erotic spy thriller "Se, Jie" (Lust, Caution). Veteran US director Brian De Palma won the Silver Lion for his hard-hitting Iraq war film "Redacted," while Australia's Cate Blanchett and US star Brad Pitt won the awards for best actress and actor. The best screenplay prize went to British director Ken Loach for his depiction of the exploitation of immigrants in "It's a Free World". The jury also bestowed a special 75th anniversary Golden Lion on legendary Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. Lee said he was accepting the Golden Lion "in the shadow of the passing of two great giants, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, I realise how huge this festival has become." He dedicated the award to Bergman, whom he saw while working on "Lust, Caution." Swedish director Bergman died on July 30 and Italian Antonioni one day later. "Ingmar hugged me the way a mother hugs a child," Lee said, adding: "This hug was not for me, it was for you, the guardians of cinema." Victorious two years ago with "Brokeback Mountain," which also won him an Oscar, this time Lee served up a tense drama set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the 1940s. Novice actress Tang Wei plays a resistance spy who slowly lets her target, a powerful political figure played by Tony Leung, "worm his way into her heart." De Palma's "Redacted," a dramatisation of the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by US soldiers, was honoured on Friday with the Future Film Festival Digital Award, for the best use of animation or visual effects. De Palma, who is best known for the psychic thriller "Carrie" and the gangster movie "Scarface" (1983), turns 67 on Tuesday. "Redacted," which is based on the actual March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers who also slaughtered her family, is a reaction to what De Palma sees as sanitised media accounts of the war presented in the United States. Private First Class Jesse Spielman, was sentenced in August to 110 years in prison for his role in the rape and killings. In 1989, De Palma made 1989 "Casualties of War" about the gang rape and murder of a young civilian girl in the Vietnam War. Blanchett played one of seven characters representing different phases of Bob Dylan's life in the biopic by Todd Haynes, "I'm Not There." She was not present to accept the best actress award. "I'm sorry I can't stand here throwing my arms around Todd, weeping just like a woman," she said in a statement read out at the ceremony. The movie also won one of two special jury awards bestowed by the all-director jury. Nor was Pitt on hand to accept his best actor award for "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Harold Ford." The two-and-a-half-hour saga directed by Andrew Dominik explores the complex relationship between the outlaw and his admirer turned traitor. The second special jury award went to Franco-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche for "La Graine et Le Mulet" (The Secret of the Grain), a saga about a Tunisian immigrant family in France which also picked up an award for Best Young Actress, Hafsia Herzi. Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov was recognised for the "consistent brilliance of (his) body of work," which reflects "great humanity and emotion and the complexity of existence." Mikhalkov, 62, presented "12" at this year's festival, a rowdy courtroom drama about a Russian jury asked to convict a Chechen youth for the murder of his stepfather. In accepting the best screenplay award, Loach paid tribute to his cast, which starred upcoming British actress Kierston Wareing as a gritty single mother-cum-entrepreneur. "Of course a screenplay means absolutely nothing if you look into an actor's eyes and don't believe them," he said. "Most of all I'd like to thank the hundreds and hundreds of workers, legal and illegal," that he met while making the film. Set in a down-and-out section of London plagued by gangs and full of job-hungry migrants, the film starts with Angie, played by Wareing, trying to make a better life for herself with apparent empathy for the workers who come to her recruitment agency in search of work.
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