VENICE 2012: Mira Nair's "Reluctant Fundamentalist" expectantly fizzles

The opening night feature at Venice Film Festival this year lost any weight or anticipation attached to it when it was announced that Mira Nair's latest, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist", would fill the spot. Last year wasn't exactly spectacular, but you could do a lot worst than the atmospherics of George Clooney's "The Ides of March". Ringing in the festival with a primarily negative response is rarely an encouraging notion, and I'll admit that I have worrisome suspicions regarding the rest of the festival. All those aside, at some point things will be picking up in some way. I can't imagine any of the three major European festivals without even a single resounding standout.

Guy Lodge (In Contention): The Mira Nair of "Mississippi Masala" would have found sufficient dramatic fire and urgency in the protagonist's ample personal conflicts with his family, his colleagues and his lover to make such a stakes-raising gambit redundant; as it is, all the film's characters are straw men in an argument as promisingly heated and finally un-nuanced as those between Anna Paquin's naively righteous Lisa and an opposingly impassioned Middle Eastern classmate in Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret." That, incidentally, is a film that spoke no less provocatively, and a lot more subtly, about the see-sawing burdens of guilt and martyrdom in post-9/11 America -- without ever being as strenuously About Things as Nair's sporadically stimulating misfire."

Mira Nair & "Looper" to open Venice & Toronto

The festival season is finally within a short breath, or a month depending on your emotional disposition this summer. It feels like the announcements of the films to open Venice and Toronto is long overdue, and I've been waiting for something grand at least when it comes to Venice. The past two years of "Black Swan" and "The Ides of March" could certainly have played host to far lesser films. Cannes too has opened rather fortunately these past two years, dealing in calm, relaxed, but spectacularly affectionate films. Unfortunately the opener for Venice this year does seem at all in keeping with the trend of strong dramatic fair, that is if we're going on simply the name value of Mira Nair.

Perhaps not immediately recognized, the Indian director is most recently known for the massive critical flop of "Amelia" back in 2009. The announcement of opening the festival with her latest film, titled "The Reluctant Fundamentalist", doesn't at all come as a pleasant notion. It kicks off the festival on a rather downtrodden note, if anything, and I'm fairly certain we'll be getting plenty reviews to that effect once late-August arrives. I could very well be wrong and operating on an assumption based on past knowledge of her work, but the title alone hints at something rather boorishly self-confident.