While SAG-affiliated actors may not be on the Lido for the Venice Film Festival at the end of the summer, two filmmakers with less than stellar reputations will be: Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. Venice creative director Albert Barbera said he doesn’t “see where the issue is” for both filmmakers bring their new films to the festival, albeit out of competition. So here they are, Allen with his first film in three years and Polanski with his first in four.
And “The Palace” looks like a pivot of sorts for Polanski: a black comedy that takes place on New Years’s Eve 1999, where a dinner party for the uber-rich at the Gstaad Palace takes an unexpected turn. So is this Polanski’s “Triangle Of Sadness“? A new clip from the film kind of makes it look that way, as does an early poster for the film.
But judge that comparison after reading the (very long) synopsis for the film attached to the YouTube video for the first trailer for “The Palace.” Read it below:
There’s a sumptuous castle designed in the early 1900s by a mystical architect: a castle located in the mountains of Switzerland, in the middle of a snowy valley. It’s the Palace Hotel, a building with a gothic and fairytale atmosphere where every year, on New Year’s Eve, rich, spoiled and vicious guests converge from all over the world.
It’s December 31, 1999. It’s the dawn of the new millennium, and Hansueli, the hotel’s devoted fifty-year-old manager, almost militarily inspects the staff before the guests arrive for New Year’s Eve 2000, reiterating that it won’t be the end of the world. A host of waiters, porters, cooks and receptionists prepares to accommodate the absurd needs of the most extravagant guests of the globe. The stories of the individual characters give life to an absurd, black, provocative comedy.
It’s the end of 1999, not just the epilogue of a century, but the end of an entire and controversial millennium.
“The Palace” stars Oliver Masucci, Fanny Ardant, John Cleese, Bronwyn James, Joaquim De Almeida, Luca Barbareschi, Milan Peschel, Fortunato Cerlino, and Mickey Rourke.
Along with directing “The Palace,” Polanski co-writes the film’s script with Jerzy Skolimowski and Ewa Piakowska. Skolimowski’s involvement with the film should get some more eyeballs on it thanks to the success of “EO” last year.
No word on what day “The Palace” premieres on the Lido, but check out a clip from the film now below.
