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Erotic homage unveiled at Venice
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-11 09:07
Filmmaking greats Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai
unveiled at the Venice Film Festival on Friday their seductive trilogy "Eros,"
devoted to eroticism and desire.
Antonioni's story
is the most sexually explicit of the trilogy.
| In the film, which is also a homage to the ailing
91-year-old Antonioni by the two internationally acclaimed young directors, each
takes a unique approach to the theme in separate vignettes.
"What motivated me to do this film was Michelangelo Antonioni, who had been
the guiding light for me and filmmakers of my generation," said Kar Wai, creator
of the sci-fi romance "2046" and arthouse favourite "In the Mood for Love."
In the first vignette, "The Hand," Hong Kong's Kar Wai weaves an erotic story
about a tailor and a courtesan played by Gong Li with sumptuous images and
rainy, dark sets.
Soderbergh's "Equilibrium," on the other hand, is a perverse comedy starring
Robert Downey Jr. as a 1950s New York ad agent who visits a psychiatrist to
unravel his mysterious erotic dreams and unblock his creativity.
Initially, Spain's Pedro Almodovar had been lined up to take part in the
project, but in the end, the award-winning U.S. director of "Traffic" and "Sex,
Lies and Videotape" stepped in.
"I wanted my name on a poster with Michelangelo Antonioni," an irreverent
Soderbergh said in the production notes.
Antonioni and his
wife, Enrica Fico, in 2002 | Finally, Antonioni,
one of Italy's most influential film directors and the cinematic father of
modern angst and alienation, offers a meditation on the gap between men and
women in "The Dangerous Thread of Things."
The story is set in the beautiful Tuscan countryside and is the most sexually
explicit of the three stories.
Antonioni's 60-year career includes Oscar-nominated "Blowup" and the
internationally acclaimed "L'Avventura" (The Adventure).
Despite a crippling stroke in 1983 which robbed him of his speech, the
Italian director is still working.
"It was very exciting to work with all those people who made this film.
Thanks for having given Michelangelo many days of life," said his wife Enrica.
Antonioni's deliberately slow-moving and oblique movies are not always crowd
pleasers, but films such as "L'Avventura" turned him into an icon for directors
like Kar Wai and Martin Scorsese, who has described him as a poet with a camera.
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