09/09/2020 - VENICE 2020: Abel Ferrara's new endeavour attempts to be a timely piece, but the final result is chaotic and fails to be incisive

Abel Ferrara's documentary Sportin' Life [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is one of the out of competition titles presented at this year's Venice Film Festival. The film follows the recent release of Siberia [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], which was presented at the Berlinale in February this year, and the premiere of said feature did indeed mark the beginning of the production process for Sportin' Life, which was ready just in time for Venice. In his director's statement, Ferrara says that the subject of his film is the relationship he has with his work, with Willem Dafoe, and with his music and art. “These relationships are the starting point, and I could not avoid facing what the world went through this year with the pandemic,” he adds.

While the premise may sound promising and seems to pave the way for an interesting video diary, the whole documentary is actually a sort of freewheeling collage of scenes that are barely connected to each other, often interrupted by concert shots. The director's scrapbook is rich in excerpts shot at the Berlinale, during the days when Siberia was participating in the festival – many of these include casual conversations with Willem Dafoe and some interviewers discussing, more or less seriously, Ferrara's films and his directorial work. There are also a few hints of his family life, with a clutch of scenes starring his daughter, Anna, and his wife, Cristina Chiriac, but these fail to convey any depth or emotional content, besides a couple of occasions on which we notice the director's playful attitude towards the child (his “little monkey”).

In the background, the COVID-19 pandemic vaguely marks the passing of time, and its tragic developments are conveyed through extensive archive footage from American media. We can certainly notice some criticism of Donald Trump's management of the healthcare crisis and, in the last part, to his response to the protests held by the Black Lives Matter movement, but this is underdeveloped and does not offer any new food for thought on the topics.

Furthermore, a significant number of scenes from the helmer's movies, such as Siberia (2020), The Addiction (1995) and Pasolini [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Abel Ferrara
film profile] (2014), in most cases do not effectively tie in with the whole discourse and only reinforce the feeling that we are watching a retrospective of the American filmmaker's work.

Finally, while some exchanges between Dafoe and Ferrara may be entertaining and pleasant to watch, their charismatic presence cannot compensate for the lack of structure – or even a simple direction to follow, some type of narrative purpose – that plagues the entire movie. At best, we get the feeling that we are watching some decent DVD bonus content. For a non-fiction feature, instead, the end product is chaotic, rushed and far from incisive. Ferrara and Dafoe's wit and strong relationship may have offered some useful material for a documentary, but their bond should have been explored in depth and should not have been limited to the footage shot during the days of the festival.

Sportin' Life is a French production staged by Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent, Gary Farkas, Clément Lepoutre and Olivier Muller for Vixens, and Diana Phillips.