The Press at the 81st Venice Film Festival | Post-War Architecture and Psychology

It was a very sensitive Brady Corbet who came to present The Brutalistin competition at Venice. Alongside Guy Pearce, as a wealthy industrialist, Adrian Brody plays a brilliant Hungarian architect who comes to try his luck in the United States in the late 1940s.

Hidden behind his dark glasses, a world away from the image of the young actor seen in Funny Gamesby Michael Haneke, and in Melancholiaby Lars von Trier, filmmaker Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux) had difficulty containing his emotions at the press conference on Sunday. He also made a point of thanking the Venice Film Festival, without which, according to him, The Brutalist would not exist.

“It was a very difficult film to make, so I am very moved,” he said. “This film is seven years of work. I am very grateful to those who spent three and a half hours watching it last night and to all those who will soon. This film tells what we are forbidden to do. We criticize a film for being long, but do we criticize a book for having more than 700 pages? Why do we want to put everything in a box? Who knows, my next film might be three-quarters of an hour long. As Harmony Korine once said: “Cinema is stuck in the birth canal.” I completely agree with him!”

“The length of a film has nothing to do with the life it tells,” illustrated Isaach de Bankolé, comparing Corbet to Fassbinder for his stubbornness.

Written with his wife, Norwegian actress and producer Mona Fastvold, whom he also warmly thanked, as well as production designer Judy Becker, “who outdid herself despite the limited budget”, The Brutalist is inspired by a book by a friend of the director who died last year, Jean-Louis Cohen, a historian of French architecture and urban planning of the 20th century.^e century, to whom we owe in particular Le Corbusier.

” In Architecture in uniformJean-Louis demonstrated that the traumas of war were manifested in the architecture of the 20th century.^e century,” Brady Corbet said. “I once asked him if he could name one person traumatized by war who had made it to the United States. “No one,” he replied. “We will never know what the Bauhaus architects who died during the war might have done afterward. So this film is a fantasy dedicated to the artists who were unable to realize their vision.”

While his wife Erszébeth (Felicity Jones), a brilliant journalist, and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) have remained in Hungary, László Tóth (Adrian Brody), a Bauhaus-educated architect, has gone to join his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in New York, where he runs a furniture store with his wife (Emma Laird). Not wanting to take advantage of Attila’s kindness, László eats at soup kitchens, lives in a homeless shelter and works several odd jobs. This is how he becomes friends with Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), who, in addition to raising his son alone, must face racism.

“My mother, Sylvia Plachy, is a great photographer who fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution to the United States. Like László, she lost everything,” said Adrian Brody. “I recognize the repercussions of her refugee experience in her work, I understand how every aspect of your life is marked by post-war psychology.”

“Erszébeth is like the train coming to America, she’s going in one direction,” Felicity Jones said of the film’s sense of urgency. “Like all great love stories, the one told in the film is driven by urgency.”

László’s destiny changes the day the children of a wealthy industrialist (Joe Alwyn and Stacy Martin) commission Attila to build a library for their father’s birthday. The man who designed the Budapest library will finally be able to demonstrate his genius. However, when he discovers his children’s surprise, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) flies into a rage. A few years later, having finally understood who László Tóth really was, the man who is as wealthy as he is untimely will propose to the architect a project that he will not be able to refuse.

To fit the era he’s depicting, with the film largely set in the 1950s, Corbet shot his film on VistaVision, a technology introduced by Paramount in 1954. “It sounds like a sewing machine!” the director exclaimed. “It was incredible, but very invigorating and very charming to work with these machines, with this old technology for an old guy like me,” said Pearce, who turns 57 in October.

While László and his family try to live their American dream, one of the characters will express his desire to move to Israel. However, this should not be seen as a political connotation or a reflection on the current situation. The Brutalist “It’s about a man who escapes socialism to meet capitalism. There’s nothing else to it,” filmmaker Brady Corbet said firmly. “What my character represents is the struggle of a filmmaker who wants to bring an indelible work into the world,” actor Adrian Brody concluded.