The fall festival triple crown ended the way it always does, with a Toronto audience getting the last word. On Sunday, those words were in Spanish. Three festivals, three very different kinds of potential voters.
Put their verdicts side by side, and the shape of the 99th Academy Awards starts to come into focus. Here are five things the festivals told us. Venice and Telluride agreed on one thing, and that’s John Malkovich.
Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine” premiered in competition on the Lido to a 13-minute standing ovation. The next day, Searchlight brought it to Telluride as the surprise patron screening, timed to John Malkovich’s Silver Medallion tribute. And nine days later, Venice closed the loop and handed him the Volpi Cup for best actor.
Malkovich plays a dying CIA agent sent to Easter Island in the tense days before Chile’s 1973 coup, and the performance is equal parts menace and, of all things, tenderness. He’s been nominated twice, for “Places in the Heart” and “In the Line of Fire and hasn’t been back since the Clinton administration. Between the prize, the tribute and the ovation, the Academy has been handed a narrative with a bow on it.
Searchlight opens the film Nov. 6. The directing team known as Los Javis has everyone’s attention now. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi won best director at Cannes in May, carried the film to Telluride and then took Toronto’s top prize.
Shot on 35mm and inspired by Federico García Lorca’s unfinished work of the same name, Spain’s Oscar selection moves among 1932, 1937 and 2017, following three generations of gay men across nearly a century of Spanish history. A subtitled Netflix film that festivalgoers won’t stop talking about is exactly where you want to be heading into the international feature race. But People’s Choice changes the size of the conversation.
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