We are just a week away from Damien Chazelle's "First Man" debuting at the Venice Film Festival (on the 29th) and, probably, two days later at the Telluride Film Festival.
Advanced screenings of "First Man," from numerous accounts that I have heard, hint at a very well-made but familiar space epic.
In a Hollywood Reporter interview from Stephen Galloway, Chazelle claims that he tried to steer far away from the pastiche of "La La Land" and went for a style that resembles a 'cinema verite' film shot in the 1960's. You know, those D.A. Pennebaker ("Don't Look Back") and Frederick Wiseman ("High School") sorta shindigs.
Galloway puts it down like this:
“Instead of turning to similarly themed films — even ones he admired, such as Apollo 13
and 2001: A Space Odyssey — [Chazelle] drew inspiration from documentaries like For All Mankind and Moonwalk One, where hard facts and precise details were ‘baked into the archival.’"
“For gritty realism, he thought of other features. ‘We watched movies like Battle of Algiers and The French Connection, says editor Tom Cross. ‘A lot of our conversations had to do with the Maysle sand D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman [all celebrated documentarians], and those cinema verite documentaries
of the 1960s — how they were put together and the ways you could join shots in such a way that it felt emotionally continuous, but actually wasn’t."
With all that being said, Chazelle's third film is far and away the most important of his career. There is a lot riding with this one for the 33 year old writer-director who showed immense filmmaking prowess with "Whiplash" and then switched it up for his second feature; the beautiful cinematic valentine "La La Land." However, the backlash the latter gathered as Oscar season rolled along proved to be detrimental for Chazelle.
As I had pointed out a few weeks ago in an essay titled "How the "La La Land" vs "Moonlight" rivalry changed American pop culture":
"But what about poor "La La Land"? Did it deserve a better fate? Well, of course it did, Chazelle's film was a victim of bad timing. Its release coincided with an anger-filled political spectrum that would be unfavorable to La La's shiny aesthetics and free-wheelin' lets-go-where-life-takes-us melancholy. Of course, the film had its darker edges, it didn't even have a happy ending, but the fact that this was a love-letter to old-school Hollywood glamour, which is automatically connected to something very white, very masculine and very backwards, felt wrong to champion for many. After all, America's dark and discriminatory history was at the forefront of many pertinent conversation-starters by the time 'La La Land" and "Moonlight" hit screens nationwide."