VENICE – MISSION. At 7.30 am on a Friday morning, the queue for the boat that goes from Venice to the Lido islet was simply hopeless. Bigger than anything we’ve seen in the last year, but significantly more than those – not small ones – that haunted us before the pandemic, in 2019. Now it’s clear that this year Venice festival is about to break several attendance records while the city itself is overflowing with thousands of tourists flooding it. However, after standing and waiting, Luca Guantanino served us the best breakfast in the hall with a story about (literal) cannibalism designed to shock as well as enchant the public. As if to say, welcome to Mostra…

However, apart from the surrealism of our own position, the Italian director, who flirts heavily with Hollywood after the great success of Call Me by Your Name, signs a purely American film here, which is also one of the best we have seen so far in Venice. Its protagonist is originally Maren (Taylor Russell), a high school student who, as we’ll soon learn, has very specific… appetites for human flesh. After a bloody episode, her father leaves her, and now she sets off on a journey to find her mother, whom she never really met. Along the way, he meets Lee (Timothée Salamet), a young man with a weakness for cannibalism, and the two embark on a journey full of strange adventures.

“We devour those we love,” Guantanino observes, as if allegorically, with black humor, but also with many insightful observations on complex human relationships. For the rest, “Bones and All” (the title refers exactly to what you imagine) has all the hallmarks of a road movie with a touch of quirky romance, plus another delightful performance from Mark Rylance, who somehow plays the “bad guy” in the story – sort of oxymoronically it did not sound in the film, where the characters eat people.

Unlike Guantanamo, the day’s other highly anticipated film didn’t quite live up to expectations. After Alfonso Cuarón (“Roma”), Netflix gave another Mexican, Alejandro G. Inarrita, a rich budget and absolute freedom of expression in order to become a festival and Oscar favorite. The result is “Bardo”a three-hour film starring a successful journalist and documentary filmmaker who faces a midlife crisis when he returns with his family to his native Mexico after years in America.

One does not need to be a connoisseur to discern Iñarritus himself behind this particular hero, representing in many respects an autobiographically self-referential film, which, however, failed to overcome the sphere of the personal in order to communicate with the viewer at the next stage. level . Of course, within the marathon length of the film there are moments of cinematic magic – after all, we are talking about the leader of modern cinema – but in general there are more shortcomings. Absolute freedom in cinema is perhaps not always the ideal solution.

Otherwise, in Venice, we see other, “smaller” films, which, nevertheless, have their own interest. As did Italian Roberto de Paolis’s “Princess,” which opened the curtain in the “Horizons” section, standing out with her truly tender look at the life of a young woman extradited from Africa.