Venice Film Festival debuts 3-hour post-war epic ‘The Brutalist,’ in 70mm

“The Brutalist,” a post-war epic about a Holocaust survivor attempting to rebuild a life in America, is a fantasy. But filmmaker Brady Corbet wishes it weren’t.

“The film is about the physical manifestation of the trauma of the 20th century,” Corbet said Sunday at the Venice Film Festival. “It’s dedicated to the artists that didn’t get to realize their vision.”

In part inspired by the late Jean-Louis Cohen’s book “Architecture in Uniform,” the film starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian architect will have its world premiere Sunday afternoon.

Spanning decades, “The Brutalist” tells the story of László Tóth and his attempts to pursue his art after the war in America. Brody plays Tóth, and Felicity Jones his wife, Erzsébet. He lives in near-poverty until a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), gives him an important contract. Joe Alwyn and Alessandro Nivola also star.

Brody said it was a character and a story he felt an “immediate kinship and understanding for.” His mother, photographer Sylvia Plachy, was a Hungarian immigrant who fled in 1956 during the anti-Soviet revolution to restart and attempt to build a life as an artist.

“Even though it’s fiction, it feels very real and very real to me,” Brody said. “That’s so important for me to embody a character and make it real.”

Running 215-minutes (with a 15-minute intermission) and presented in 70mm (it was shot in Vista Vision), “The Brutalist” arrived in Venice with expectations high. There were whispers of “a masterpiece” before it had screened; Reviews won’t go up until after the red-carpet premiere, however.

Even the 70mm format alone seemed like a bold statement for a film without U.S. distribution left: Though a favorite of cinephiles, the expense seems to be reserved for a select few, like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve. In other words, not often something afforded to an indie.

Wearing sunglasses, Corbet was feeling emotional speaking about the film, which he’d worked on for seven years.

“This film does everything that we are told we are not allowed to do,” said Corbet. He added that conversations about runtime are “silly.”

“I’ve read great novellas, I’ve read great multi-volume masterpieces,” Corbet said. “Maybe the next thing I make will be about 45 minutes, and I should be allowed to do that. … As Harmony Korine once said, cinema is stuck in the birth canal. And I agree with him.”

In 2018 Corbet brought his divisive “Vox Lux,” in which Natalie Portman plays a pop star who witnessed a school shooting in her youth, to Venice. He earlier premiered “The Childhood of a Leader” there. Corbet, also an actor, wrote the script with his wife Mona Fastvold, who is also a filmmaker (“The World to Come”). Corbet thanked the Venice Film Festival for supporting him.

“When no one was supporting these films, this festival was,” he said. “It made my films possible.”

“The Brutalist” is playing in competition at the festival, which is well underway having already hosted glamorous premieres with Angelina Jolie (“Maria”), Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”), Cate Blanchett (“Disclaimer”), Jude Law (“The Order”) with many more to come.

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