The latest from Venice: Sex, politics, and Tilda Swinton speaking Italian

By Sarah Sluis
FJI critic Jon Frosch continues his exclusive coverage of the 66th annual Venice Film Festival.

One day past the midpoint at this year's Mostra, the consensus is that the selection is pretty good�few great films, perhaps, but few disasters, and plenty of interesting work from all corners of the globe both in and out of competition.

One constant, of course, is that critics can't seem to agree on much. A case in point is French director Patrice Chreau's intense in-competition relationship drama Perscution, which got a chilly reception from nearly everyone except�you guessed it�the French. I'm siding with France on this one: The film is an unflinching, sharply observed look at a couple plagued by what one might call severe intimacy issues. Romain Duris plays Daniel, a scowling young Parisian apartment renovator stalked by a man (Jean-Hughes Anglade) who claims to be madly and unconditionally in love with him. It looks like we're in for a psycho thriller about homosexual obsession, but Chreau gradually pulls back to reveal his true focus: how this vexing situation becomes a turning point in Daniel's relationship with his independent, cool-headed girlfriend (Charlotte Gainsbourg), bringing to light their failure to fulfill one another's needs.

The movie is tough, bleak stuff, but I found it to be brave and deeply insightful in its dissection of two people who love each other but are slowly undone by crippling insecurity, neediness and lack of communication. Duris and Gainsbourg, in richly written roles, do devastating work.

More of the tortured romance, but less of the substance, was on display in one of the highest-profile out-of-competition screenings: Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love (Io Sono L'Amore), a handsomely made Italian saga starring Tilda Swinton as a Russian woman whose affair with a young chef threatens to crumble the wealthy Milanese family she has married into. The film is a throwback to the melodramas of the '40s and '50s, but despite the confident camerawork and editing, pounding score, a few knockout sequences (including a Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse bit in Sanremo) and an excellent performance from Swinton in a gentler register, it's surprisingly lacking in real tension. With the exception of Swinton, the characters are thinly drawn and pretty much do exactly as we expect, and for all the passionate embraces and painful revelations, the story unfolds rather remotely and with few surprises. What we end up with is as dramatically bland as it is visually accomplished�a movie puffed up with tragic emotions that the filmmakers never make us feel.

One of the most rapturous rounds of applause thus far was for Michael Moore, who's at it again with Capitalism: A Love Story, an in-competition documentary that uses the financial crisis as a pivoting point for a blazing critique of the American economic machine. As is the case with all of Moore's films, this one is snappily edited (the director makes mischievous use of archive footage and old movie and cartoon clips) and consistently engaging, as the director turns his wisecracking Midwestern wit on a handful of highly deserving targets. No matter how questionably documented and hastily fact-checked his films might be, Moore remains an uncommonly entertaining�albeit subjective�synthesizer/simplifier of complex political problems.

If the film isn't as rousing as Fahrenheit 9/11, for example, it's perhaps because that doc was essentially an anti-Bush tract, while this one tackles an entire system and philosophy. Not to mention the reality that Moore's tactics have grown even more transparent, and, inevitably, more grating: Just when you think he's conquered his most annoying tics (fawning over other countries, hammily staged stunts), he slips in some good old-fashioned grandstanding near the end. After attempting to make a citizen's arrest of AIG execs, Moore saunters up to the New York Stock Exchange and proceeds to put crime-scene tape around the building. Funny enough, I guess, but I'm still looking forward to a Michael Moore documentary with less Michael Moore in it.

Some of the movies that made the strongest impressions the last few days were screened out of competition: Good Morning Aman, a strikingly assured first feature from Italian Claudio Noce that focuses on a young Somalian who struggles to find his footing in an unwelcoming Rome; Chuyen Bui Thac's Choi Voi (Adrift), a Vietnamese film that portrays romantic angst among a handful of young Hanoi dwellers with startling emotional immediacy; and from Sweden, A Rational Solution, in which Jorgen Bergmark blends Bergmanesque gravitas with bedroom farce in a remarkably mature feature-length debut about two middle-aged couples who move in together for reasons I won't disclose here.