Venice (2010)
An atmospheric coming-of-age story featuring an imaginative young boy named Marek who dreams of escaping an increasingly dangerous Poland on the eve of war for beautiful Venice.
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I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.
if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
A film well worth seeing, experiencing, piecing together. I offer some of the pieces, without yet being able to offer the "together." I just returned from a showing at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and was disturbed enough by the low aggregate scores on IMDb.com to attempt a review.Venice is the Lost Paradise of Atlantis, the city of which young Marek dreams in 1939 as he trains to be a Defender of the Polish homeland. He writes his hopes for the future on a piece of paper that he inserts in the wishing wall of the Catholic church next to the boys' dormitory that houses him as the film begins. Meanwhile, father and mother abandon him to the decaying family estate that serves as a refuge for aunts, cousins, where he continues his refrain of "I don't want to be here." A flooded cellar provides a temporary fantasy escape to a paper Venice; steps beyond its confines introduce him to the world of brutality and horror from Nazi invaders and the intimations that Soviet liberators offer a threat of their own.There is much beauty yet in the women and girls surrounding him, in the remnants of a cultured world in architecture and music. Many scenes are in sunlit nature or golden haze. Marek seems too young to make sense of the world of adults or of the budding sexuality of his more precocious female playmates, yet adult life choices confront him in the most importunate ways.