Venice Venice

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: C+     Film: B-

 

 

Added to the long list of films trying to deconstruct the making and selling of filmmaking is Henry Jaglom’s Venice Venice (1992), which tries to parallel romantically-thought-of Venice, Italy and more realistic Venice, California as a metaphor for taking a look at how many of our ideas of romance come from films.  Even Jaglom falls in love in the narrative section of the film, while many women on camera throughout; tell of their romantic notions that resulted from growing up on films.

 

The film has been criticized for Jaglom being to pretentious or egotistical, which is not helped by him playing a very irritated version of himself, or so he says he is not that bad in real life.  This alone is actually a major distraction from what he is able to do here, which is offer a new view of deconstruction by his focus on women, which he is also much criticized for.  He explains they are more honest, even if it takes him being very dishonest about himself to validate this.  That also hurts the film.

 

The other problem, besides that much of the territory has still be covered before, is that the film runs on too long.  This does not create any major results or different or better states of mind.  He is often saying things only he understands he is saying, which is very much confirmed by his even more run-on audio commentary track, which eve he admits runs on.  That is sad, because with a different approach, he may have yielded something more extraordinary, but we instead get something that backfires more often than it should.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is not bad for the age of the film, but the cinematography by Hanania Baer is not meant to look to extraordinary either, with the shots of the more glamorous places and buildings made to look as ordinary as they could be made outside of using filters or the two forms of visual degradation: chemical and digital.  The film is available in Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono or slightly better Dolby 5.1 AC-3, while the commentary is also Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono.  Extras include that commentary, an on-camera intro by Jaglom that could have eliminated the commentary by being a few minutes longer, filmographies, DVD-ROM weblinks, and trailers for several Wellspring films, including this one.

 

David Duchovny also shows up as an actor from the film Jaglom is promoting, at a time when he was taking chances pre-X-Files with filmmakers like Jaglom and David Lynch (Twin Peaks).  He is somewhat unrecognizable, not just because he is young, but because he is not grinning with self-satisfaction.  This is a good actor who allowed himself to be lured into bad commercial film projects, something Jaglom has not yet allowed.  Sometimes, you can be damned in whatever you do, and I bet Jaglom knew this going into Venice Venice.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo