Venice Film Festival 2011: 4.44 Last Day On Earth

Fittingly, my last film of Venice 68 was Abel Ferrara's 4.44 Last Day On Earth, a two-hander starring Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh, aka Mrs Ferrara, as Cisco and Skye, a couple living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who are dealing with the news of an impending apocalypse. This being an Abel Ferrara movie, they greet it by having a big argument, after which Cisco pops out to score a nice bit of heroin. However, the Driller Killer director must have mellowed in his old age, since the film then takes a turn for the spiritual. Clips of the Dalai Lama speaking are littered throughout the movie, along with footage of a kind of motivational Buddhist speaker and snippets of Al Gore, and Ferrara's point seems to be that the end is something to be embraced not feared.

It doesn't rank with his best films, which are looking further and further away these days (The Funeral of 15 years ago marked the end of an interesting couple of decades), but there are a few good moments here. The nicest thing is perhaps the extremity of its low budget: outside their flat, life is going on as normal. Nobody is looting, there are cars on the streets, and at one point a Chinese delivery boy brings round a takeaway, which Cisco seems to pay 300 bucks for. And towards the end there's some creepy, atmospheric CG, as the skies over New York are whipped into a forbidding green storm that knocks out all the city's lights in an especially chilling moment. To get there, though, you have to endure an awful lot of talking and emoting, most of which left me cold.

So that was that. My visit this year was cut short, which means I'll miss William Friedkin's Killer Joe and Ami Canaan Mann's Texas Killing Fields, both of which I'm hoping to catch up with at my next two festivals (Toronto first, then San Sebastian). But in retrospect, this wasn't quite the vintage festival that Venice 68 looked to be on paper. It was a strong line-up in principle but not everything delivered (“Fool's gold,” as one critic put it). And while it struggles to do something with the massive Ground Zero hole out front, which has been there for several years now, Venice really seems to have lost its footing as a place for filmmakers. Celebrities are boated in and boated out, but there's no heart to the festival: nowhere to mingle, no watering hole or relaxed meeting place.

It's impressive enough to think that, in the last seven days, the festival has welcomed George Clooney, Madonna, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Monica Bellucci, Jet Li, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, Al Pacino and James Franco. But outside of that razzle-dazzle, the selection of non-competition films has been uninspiring to say the least. And even within it, the obsession with celebrity – all over the world – has had a devastating impact on press coverage here. Press conferences are bland and boring. The interviews, when we can get them, are almost as bad. And while the festival will have time to change and improve, that's the one thing that can only get worse…