Time was, Venice was the poor relation of the film world. Its Golden Lion, the top award of the annual Venice Film Festival, could never match the clout that the Oscar wielded in the bellwether American film market. Nor did this city ever claim to compete with the Cannes International Film Festival when it came to influencing the buying and selling of movies.
That back-seat approach had its advantages, notably the lack of frenetic commercial activity, which meant that serious films really were the center of the showcase. The decision to open the 52d Venice Film Festival last Wednesday with Tony Scott's submarine thriller "Crimson Tide" reflects how far Venice has come. As an added touch, Denzel Washington, one of the stars of the film, dropped by for a drink with the crew aboard an Italian Navy submarine anchored in the lagoon.
Another sign of change is the growing American presence here. A decade ago or so, the average festival program included one or perhaps two American movies. This year, in addition to "Crimson Tide," the American entries vying for the top prize include Spike Lee's "Clockers," a violent tale of young blacks in the urban drug world, and Sean Penn's "Crossing Guard," about the aftermath of a traffic accident, starring Jack Nicholson.
Kevin Costner showed up to plug his hugely expensive "Waterworld" extravaganza, which was shown out of competition along with Woody Allen's "Mighty Aphrodite," the story of a father's hazardous search for the real mother of his son, and "Apollo 13," with Tom Hanks. The Venice festival has become a regular slot for Mr. Allen, whose "Manhattan Murder Mystery" and "Bullets Over Broadway" have also been shown here.
Some critics are uncomfortable with the way the festival has changed under the hand of the Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo, who became its director three years ago. Some wanted the opening film to be Michelangelo Antonioni's "Par Dela des Nuages" ("Beyond the Clouds"), which was directed with the German film maker Wim Wenders and marked a return to film after 14 years for Mr. Antonioni, who is 83.
Other critics remarked on the heavy emphasis on American films and noted that Eastern Europe, which produced great winners by Polish, Czech and Russian film makers in the past, is woefully under-represented this year. The Russians are represented by only one film, "Cardiogram," a low-budget documentary by Darezhan Omirbayev, a director from Kazakhstan. Last year the Golden Lion was shared by "Vive l'Amour," by the Chinese director Ts'ai Ming Liang, and "Before the Rain," the Macedonian entry. This year, Chinese films are notably absent.
But the festival has its defenders. "There's a school of thought that would like to transform Venice into a laboratory of the avant-garde," wrote Tullio Kezich of the newspaper Corriere Della Sera. "Let's hope it never comes to power, because the festival must remain the institutionalized ecumenical showcase of Gillo Pontecorvo, in which all the realities of film have a place."
Mr. Kezich went on to heap praise on two of this year's entries for "intelligent entertainment." The first was Claude Chabrol's "Ceremonie" and the other "In the Bleak Midwinter," the latest film by Kenneth Branagh. The first tells the violent story of two young women, a governess and a prostitute, in the self-satisfied world of provincial France; the second is a black-and-white comedy that chronicles the misadventures of a theatrical troupe attempting to perform "Hamlet," with Joan Collins as a dizzy actors' agent. Mr. Branagh said he turned it out almost as a distraction from work on a serious production of "Hamlet," in which he has the title role and which he has been filming on location in Italy.
Meanwhile the festival, which ends with the presentation of the Golden Lion award on Saturday, is having its fill of razzmatazz. In addition to Mr. Washington's submarine stunt, Venice's gondoliers threatened to block key canals to protest the continuing erosion of the waterways by the waves raised by motorized craft. Then a flurry of supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, arrived to plug "Unzipped," the documentary about the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi.
One critic, Mariuccia Ciotta of the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto, sniffed that it probably required greater courage to open the festival with "Crimson Tide" than to fire the nuclear torpedoes aboard the Alabama, the submarine setting of the film. Others lauded the American entries and were captivated by the wild adventures of "Waterworld." Michele Anselmi of L'Unita thought it compared favorably with the romances of Jules Verne.
The arrival of American directors and actors was major news in nearly all of Italy's newspapers, and a news conference Tuesday afternoon at which Spike Lee talked about "Clockers" was standing-room-only. Most critics seemed to struggle to find negative things to say about the American movies. Lietta Tornabuoni of La Stampa spoke of Mr. Allen's "intelligent, spirited and self-ironizing magic" in "Mighty Aphrodite."
In an interview, the 76-year-old Mr. Pontecorvo depicted Venice as the "world capital of cinematographic auteurs," using the French code word evoking movies as individual works of a director's art. Yet for some, American box-office winners appeared to be the bait with which Mr. Pontecorvo hopes to capture increasingly skeptical young moviegoers for the kind of intellectually complicated films represented by directors like Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Chabrol.
Despite Mr. Pontecorvo's concern about youthful apathy, a hallmark of this year's festival was the particular notice drawn by Italian films. Giuseppe Tornatore's "Uomo Delle Stelle" ("Man of Stars") traced the history of a Sicilian con man who sells dreams of a future in the movies. Ettore Scola won some favorable comment for "Diario di un Giovane Povero" ("Diary of a Poor Young Man"). Italian newspapers of all stripes, which cannot resist reopening old murder cases long thought resolved, threw themselves on Marco Tullio Giordana's "Pasolini: Un Delitto Italiano" ("Pasolini: An Italian Crime"), which stirred fresh speculation about the brutal murder in 1975 of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of Italy's most gifted modern writers and movie directors, by a male lover.
With all the attention to water and the oceans drawn by "Waterworld" and "Crimson Tide," it was little wonder that political debate turned often to the French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Thus, a 1993 documentary by a French director, Michel Daeron, "Mururoa, le Grand Secret" ("Mururoa, the Big Secret"), consisting of interviews with South Pacific residents about past French nuclear testing, drew more attention than it might have otherwise. Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire, the French actresses who played the main roles in Mr. Chabrol's film, acidly criticized French Government policy.
Mr. Costner added his voice to the debate. "We cannot tell other countries how to behave," he told reporters. "But my advice to a country is that they should blow up a bomb closer to their own home, in their own ocean."
