Start as Christmas holidays, with a luxurious mountain hotel at the crossroads of the stories of bizarre and high-ranking characters; continues with a hilarious series of gags, in which the former Monty Python stands out John Cleese in version Weekend with the dead; repeatedly mentions the cinema of Roman Polanskilike the quirky insulation underpinning That? or the patch on the nose of Jack Nicholson in Chinatownwhich this time ends up on the nose of Luke Barbareschi; closes on a curious coupling between dog and penguin from an American demented comedy and with the tragicomic vomiting of a rich woman, who seems to have come out of Triangle of Sadness. A monstrous cinematic hybrid entitled The Palacenew film by Roman Polanski presented out of competition at Venice 80, written together with friends, colleagues and compatriots Jerzy Skolimowski ed Ewa Piaskowska.
We find ourselves in the elegant Palace Hotel in Gstaad, Switzerland, on the historic night between December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000, amid fears of the infamous Millennium bug and the rise to power in Russia of Vladimir Putinnamed his successor by Boris Yeltsin precisely in those excited hours between one millennium and the next. The serious and indefatigable hotel manager Hansueli Oliver Masucci it is in fibrillation, because among its high-ranking guests there really are those who can have the power to influence the world economy. Among these stand out the American Bill Crush (Mickey Rourke), Arthur William Dallas III (John Cleese), ready to celebrate his wedding anniversary with his young wife, the Marchesa (Fanny Ardant) together with his dog with intestinal problems and Bongo (Luca Barbareschi, also producer), a gifted actor. An opulent museum of horrors, which as midnight approaches reveals itself in all its grotesque nature.
The Palace: Roman Polanski’s new grotesque comedy that mocks the rich and powerful
Having reached the age of 88 and always haunted by his legal troubles, which make it extremely difficult for him to obtain financing for his projects, Roman Polanski stages a laughing and bitter mockery of the rich and powerful, which looks both at the comedy of Ernest Lubitsch both to the recent politically committed declinations of the grotesque (Ruben Östlund), while maintaining its own independence from the aforementioned trends, as well as an amused and deliberate inclination to the wildest trash.
The fauna of the Palace Hotel Roman Polanski knows it well, and it shows. In fact, with irony and ferocity, the director outlines a group of human carcasses, with faces disfigured by old age, vices and the catastrophic results of plastic surgery. People totally disconnected from reality, capable of setting the hotel on fire due to an attack of pet dysentery, of living with a corpse for hours to maintain the rights to the inheritance and of moving far beyond the financial illicit get some slim chance of earning through the Millennium bug. After photographing horror in confined spaces in memorable works such as Rosemary’s Baby, The tenant of the third floor, Bile moon e Death and the MaidenPolanski transports him to the luxury and splendor of a place almost unattainable for mere mortals, where the physical, intellectual and moral death of the upper middle class is consumed.
The Palace: the human rubble of the upper middle class
In the midst of a widespread and generalized squalor, Polanski refreshes an evergreen repertoire of gags made up of dancing hairpieces, rigor mortis with problematic implications, upright businessmen dominated by the charm of young and pleasant women and sexual adventures between people at the antipodes in age and social class. Far from the geometries and rich scenography of Grand Budapest Hotel, The Palace it turns into a decadent but still hilarious antechamber of death, in which each character is faced with his own failure but continues on his own path, not caring about the rubble of his own existence and producing new ones.
In this fair of pettiness and junk, the line between bad taste is extremely blurred, and it is easy to expect polarized reactions both in terms of critics and from the point of view of the public. To give this last thesis at least a solid argument are the obvious budget limitations, which make the outdoor scenes almost completely absent and force Polanski to take some panoramic shots of the hotel in a really false and unpleasant CGI, therefore perfectly in line with the faces of some guests of the Palace Hotel. But even though the director’s deep disgust for these characters and their environment is clear, the feeling remains that Polanski has even held back, transforming the protagonists into despicable but all in all harmless caricatures, without turning the knife in the wound.
A sinister omen
At the end of this crazy and ridiculous New Year’s Eve party, all that remains are broken glasses, scraps of food, disparate human liquids on the floors and a generalized embarrassment, destined to disappear in a short time until the next gala party. In the midst of these physical and moral ruins, however, the words of Vladimir Putin resound, who today with a rather sinister pride reassures his nation, announcing that all acquired rights will remain unchanged. The most intimate meaning of The Palacewhich documenting the collapse of the world elite warns us about our sad present, with the people called upon to decide the fate of the globe far too similar to the guests of the Palace Hotel in Gstaad.
The Palace will arrive in Italian theaters on September 28, distributed by 01 Distribution.