Venice/Venice

Dean (Henry Jaglom) is a director whose film, by chance, has been chosen to represent the United States at the film festival in Venice. A beautiful French journalist comes to the festival to interview the egocentric American. After many ifs and buts, she gets five nervous minutes with Dean, who has been interviewed to pieces. The minutes turn into hours, days and love.

Comment:
What is film and what is reality?
In the middle of dinner in a restaurant in Venice the director, Dean, points straight into the camera and says: ''If there was a camera there, would this not be reality then?''
Venice/venice has something of the chinese puzzle to it. The film is about the independent anti-Hollywood director Dean played by the independent anti-Hollywood director Henry Jaglom - who falls in love with a French journalist and makes a movie about the independent anti-Hollywood director who falls in love with a French journalist.
Henry Jaglom never once lets the audience feel sure about what is reality or film or film within the film. One moment the film looks something like a news transmission,
with people running in front of the camera and irritating car noise in the background. A few scenes later Dean and Jeanne are sitting in a gondola kissing. In the style of an American mini-series it is filmed in soft focus and the couple point at buildings, laugh and cuddle while the speakers are filled with muzak.
Every now and then Henry Jaglom lets some women talk about the distorted picture of love that films have given them; how they waited for a Clark Gable of their own who would come and sweep them away to a happily-ever-after.
The film within the film, shifting between soft focus and harsh reality, the disillusioned women and not least the director's alter ego part, confuse the viewer into a message in the form of an anti-message:
Is it possible to portray the truth on film?
Or as one of the women says: ''I used
to think it was so romantic when the hero just grabbed hold of a woman and brutally kissed her. But if it happened to me in real life I would slap him''.
Jonas Lagerstrom