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VENICE - The Venice film festival opened yesterday with Atonement, an adaptation of Ian McEwan's acclaimed novel about a girl whose fertile imagination leads her to make a false accusation that has tragic consequences.
The movie, starring British actress Keira Knightley, is the first of 22 entries in
the festival's main competition, and was screened to the press ahead of the evening red carpet premiere.
For 11 days the Lido waterfront will be home to hundreds of journalists there for the films and to follow the stars as they promote their pictures and party into the early hours.
Knightley wore an empire-style full-length ivory dress and a pink belt for the gala screening, which officially launched the 64th edition of the world's oldest movie contest.
In Atonement, she reunites with up-and-coming British director Joe Wright after they collaborated on Pride and Prejudice, in which the actress played Elizabeth Bennet and won an Oscar nomination.
This time the 22 year-old plays Cecilia Tallis, whose life is turned upside down when sister Briony blames her lover Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) for a crime he did not commit.
Briony goes on to becomes a writer and seeks redemption in the real world and through a novel she knows will be her last.
"She (Briony) did have some success," Wright told reporters.
"This was one of the difficult questions when we were adapting the book - would her literary success look like she hadn't paid for her crime?
"And hopefully we conveyed that literary success or career success isn't necessarily the road to her redemption. Her art is her road to redemption, if she ever gets there."
THREE BRIONIES
Faithful to the books' three-act structure, Briony is played as a 13-year-old girl by Saoirse Ronan, as a young nurse during World War Two by Romola Garai and as an ageing and ailing author by Vanessa Redgrave.
The first act takes place in a grandiose English country house in the 1930s, where Turner is the housekeeper's son.
It moves to the grim battlefields of northern Europe in act two, as Wright recreates the chaos of the evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkirk through an ambitious single, steadicam shot.
The third act is set in a hospital for wounded soldiers and the "postscript" in a television studio where an elderly Briony is interviewed about her life and novel.
Throughout the action, the sound of an old typewriter mingles with the score, reminding viewers that what they are watching may be part of the narrative or of Briony's fiction.
The performances are reminiscent of old black-and-white films, with stylised gestures and clipped, British accents which Wright uses to communicate the social restrictions of the time.
Knightley said she had not read the novel when first approached for the part.
"I read the script when Joe gave it to me and cried, and I think any script that makes you cry is worth pursuing."
She also denied a recent report that an image of her used in a perfume advertisement was touched up to exaggerate her curves.
"Actually what this film shows is the danger when the line between fiction and fact gets blurred. I think that people have to be very honest about fiction. Magazine pictures, for example, are fiction."
- REUTERS
