As regards the Donostia Award that Cate Blanchett has received today in the San Sebastian Film Festival, The most appropriate question to ask is not why the competition has decided to award it to him, but rather why it has taken so long to do so; his, after all, is one of those careers whose review takes your breath away. Over the course of more than three decades he has worked with authors of the stature of Martin ScorseseJim Jarmusch, Wes Anderson, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Peter Jackson, Todd Haynes, Steven SpielbergWoody Allen, Guillermo del Toro, Richard Linklater, Alfonso Cuarón and Todd Field. And in the meantime he has won two Oscars -she has been nominated for the award eight times-, four Golden Globes and a Coppa Volpi among many other trophies; for the one she won tonight to fit in with all the others, she will probably have to do some work in her living room. “I don’t think I became an actress with the aim of winning anything or, rather, with a particular aim,” the Australian confessed today hours before collecting the award. “Of course, These types of recognitions are wonderfulespecially when they come from critics or cultures that are not yours, because in that case the appreciation for your work that they show has an added importance. That is why, this year, being on the side of Javier Bardem be and Pedro Almodovar two of the greats of current cinema, is very significant to me,” he added, referring to the other two recipients of an honorary award at this edition of the festival.
Blanchett’s filmography includes 60 feature films completed and three others in various stages of production, plus a dozen television jobs, so it’s understandable that it’s hard to pick a favorite among all the filmmakers she’s worked with. “I really value not only the opportunities to work with certain directors but also my collaborations with cinematographers, costume designers, makeup artists, writers, and of course other actors,” she says. “If anything, I’m generally very grateful for directors who surprise me, and who see things in me that I couldn’t see myself. And I think the last time I felt that kind of connection was with Todd Field “I was very excited to be part of the filming of Tar,” she adds, referring to the role that earned her her last Oscar nomination to date. “Initially, that role was like a mountain that I didn’t know how to climb, and that scared me a lot. Thank God, I learned a long time ago to turn fear into enthusiasm.”
It is a lesson he received from the theatre, a discipline that he confesses remains his great passion today. “Because it allows me to maintain close contact with the public,” he says. “When you work in cinema you tend to keep your distance from the public, especially in this present time when your work is often shown on streaming, and therefore it is difficult to calculate audience ratings. For me, The number of viewers is an important fact, but not for commercial reasons“I care about how many people I can connect with.”
In search of the Pope
The German Edward Berger has also become accustomed to winning awards, specifically thanks to the recognition he has received around the world thanks to ‘All quiet on the front’ (2022). If that anti-war drama portrayed the anguish of a young soldier during the First World War, the film with which he now hopes to obtain the Golden Shell In the Basque competition, it takes place on a very different battlefield, less bloody, but possibly almost as brutal: the process of electing a new Popeduring which the Vatican cardinals seclude themselves to deliberate and which, at least in this case, involves several stabs in the back and the fall from grace of more than one high-level ecclesiastical figure.
Based on the novel of the same name published by Robert Harris in 2016, ‘Conclave‘ makes a gesture of examining the role of the Church in the world after the sex scandals It is a film that is full of questions about the things it has been battered by and how much it is possible to modernise the institution without losing its essence, but the truth is that these issues are not explored as they would have undoubtedly deserved. It is much more effective as long as it focuses on functioning as a variation on an Agatha Christie story in which Ralph Fiennes plays an honourable priest who could well have been called Hercule Poirot, and in which revelations of secrets, conspiracies and unexpected plot twists pile up. It is a truly admirable film for the amount of suspense it manages to generate. almost exclusively through scenes in which actors in cassocks speak to each other, often in whispers, and through the eloquence with which it suggests that within the ecclesiastical hierarchy there prevail power dynamics, aberrant ideological positions and outsized egos similar to those that define politics.
