At the world premiere of “The Brutalist” at the Venice Film Festival the applause was so extensive that one got a sense that the crowd would continue clapping long enough to match the film’s 215-minute runtime if the staff at the Sala Grande let them.
Starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, and Isaach de Bankolé, the latest film from director Brady Corbet, written with his wife Mona Fastvold, could be summed up as a detailed account of the life of a fictional Brutalist architect who survived WWII, and after emigrating to the United States, falls into trying to build a masterpiece for a wealthy client. Though Focus Features bought the international rights to the ambitious film, the U.S. distribution rights for “The Brutalist” are still up for grabs.
Sitting within its first public screening at La Biennale, one could tell the postwar epic was going over well with the audience when there was rapturous applause at the end of the first act (the over three and a half hour film has an intermission.) Shortly after the film screened for press and industry the day before the premiere, there were already whispers that Corbet’s film will be the likely choice to win the Golden Lion, as it is one of the titles in the Main Competition.
Earlier in the day, Corbet started off the film’s press conference in an emotional state, taking a moment up top to thank the festival programmers, “because when no one was supporting these films, this festival was, and it really made my films possible.” The “Vox Lux” director has had both his previous films premiere at Venice, with his directorial debut “The Childhood of a Leader” earning him two awards, the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a Debut Film and Best Director in the Horizons (Orizzonti) section of the festival.
Later on, the director said “This was an incredibly difficult film to make. I’m very emotional today because I’ve been working on it for seven years, and it felt urgent every day for part of a decade. I’m just really grateful to everyone that spent three and a half hours with it last night. We’ll spend three and a half hours with it later today. And the cast and crew that made this film possible, because this film does everything that we are told we are not allowed to do.”
At the premiere later in the day, the takeaway seemed to be that attendees were just as grateful to have witnessed “The Brutalist.”