The Venice Film Festival Moments Everyone’s Talking About

5 min read

Diane von Furstenberg receives me barefoot. She’s wearing a black T-shirt and white linen trousers and is stretched along a chaise lounge in the Palazzo Brandolini, with the Grand Canal doing its best Canaletto beneath the windows. She has a theory. “Venice is a woman,” she says. “Five years ago I read a biography of Venice, and I started seeing her as a woman.” It was day two of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, and by nightfall Diane would stand on the stage of the Teatro Carlo Goldoni for the 17th annual DVF Awards and prove her point.

Von Furstenberg first saw the palazzo rooms at 19, unmarried, on the arm of her future husband Egon von Furstenberg, whose aunt, Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda, lived there. That night, Italian film producer Marina Cicogna threw what Diane still calls the most glamorous party of her life. Jane Fonda came with Roger Vadim and Elizabeth Taylor came with Richard Burton. Half a century later, Cristiana told her that if she loved von Furstenberg so much she should take the apartment. “The whole palace will be family,” she said.

Diane von Furstenberg and Jane Fonda.

The telephone interrupts our conversation. The call concerns the size of Gloria Steinem’s name on the evening’s tribute. Steinem had died the day before. “It’s not respectful,” Diane says, of the small wording. “I want it big.” Her dear friend had just passed, and Diane had already decided whom the night belonged to.

The Awards began as her son’s idea and became real when Tina Brown asked for help with her Women in the World summit. The event became part of the program, and 17 years on, the criteria haven’t moved an inch: “The courage to fight, the strength to survive, and the leadership to inspire. That’s inspired by my mother,” she explains. And her advice for being the woman you want to be? “The most important dialogue is the dialogue you have with yourself. That’s the only way to own it. That’s the only way to be in charge.”

At the Goldoni—a jewel box of gilded tiers and coral velvet—she called this year’s five honorees “the very best of humanity”: Jane Fonda; Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados; the photojournalist Lynsey Addario; Food4Education’s Wawira Njiru; and Gisèle Pelicot, who waived her anonymity so that shame would change sides. “Courage can take many forms,” Pelicot said at the September 3 ceremony. “The courage to refuse injustice. The courage to pass on knowledge.” Fonda, introduced by Anita Hill, spoke of Steinem living on “in the changed lives of so many women, including my own,” then delivered the line of the week: “Hope is a muscle when you use it.” After the ceremony, we spilled across the water to Palazzo Franchetti for dinner—Barry Diller, Karlie Kloss, Dries Van Noten, Jürgen Teller—and I thought of the girl at Marina Cicogna’s party, and how she never forgot.

Amal and George Clooney arrive at the “The Future of… Creativity.”

The next morning at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Finch & Partners and CAA convened the forum “The Future of… Creativity,” with Emily Maitlis moderating. Maggie Gyllenhaal—presiding over this year’s competition jury while premiering Flesh Impact, her Marilyn Monroe film—confessed her backers had asked her to use AI: train it on Marilyn, map the face onto Dakota Johnson’s. “We worked very hard at it,” she said, “and in the end, they threw it away, because what was coming through Dakota was so much more moving, human, alive.” George Clooney, fresh from his Venice Film Festival Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, allowed that “some portion” of actors will be replaced. Sculptor Kennedy Yanko had her own way of thinking of it: “Preciousness is the future.” Her abstractions, she told me, are meant to be felt rather than understood. “You get to feel the feeling without knowing the story.”

Back at Airelles Palladio, the recently opened resort, Ellen Burstyn, whose movie Place to Be premiered at the festival, appeared on my screen. A fall a few weeks earlier had put her on a walker, so she’d missed the opening ceremony; she was resting for Sunday, when she would receive her own Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. She was delighted that Laura Dern had presented Clooney’s award—Laura’s first film was Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She played a little girl at the diner counter where Ellen’s character waited tables. As for Marilyn, Ellen knew her through Ralph Roberts, the masseur and confidant they shared. Marilyn could board a plane bare-faced in a headscarf and go unnoticed, he told Burstyn—until one afternoon in Beverly Hills when every car began to honk. “Did you do that on purpose?” Roberts asked. “I just felt like being Marilyn Monroe for a minute,” Monroe said. “That was all her creation,” says Burstyn. Seventy years into her career, what’s missing for Burstyn? “One of the great Shakespearean roles. Maybe in Central Park.”

Dinner in the Airelles courtyard.

That evening, under the glittering lanterns of the Airelles courtyard, legendary chefs Nobu Matsuhisa, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Norbert Niederkofler, and Cédric Grolet cooked an eight-hands dinner, an exclusive, one-night collaboration. Over glazed carrots with almond butter at ABC Kitchen, Jean-Georges had told me he wasn’t sacrificing anything in working with the group: “Everybody has his own flavor.”

“A restaurant is like a movie,” he said. “For two hours, you come into my hands.” Grolet, whose trompe l’oeil fruits have made him pastry’s most photographed man, closed the evening with an Iced Lemon. “The freshness of the lemon, the light, that feeling of Mediterranean sunshine,” he describes it. Instagram, he insists, is the doorway to, not the destination of, his creations: “The image makes you want to discover it, but it is the taste that creates the memory.”

We ended the night at Aman Venice, where Kristina Romanova, the CEO of Aman Essentials, and Golden Globes president Helen Hoehne hosted a cocktail party on the lagoon. Emma Corrin, Pamela Anderson, and Taika Waititi drifted through the frescoed salons, and Hoehne spoke candidly about her ambitions for the storied awards ceremony. “It makes sense for the Golden Globes to have a presence beyond one night in Beverly Hills,” she said. “Venice is an important step in that evolution.” Over breakfast the next morning, Romanova gave me the brief: “The room should have energy, but it shouldn’t ask anything of you.”

Venice is a woman, Diane insists. This week, she was in charge.