Sunglass-sporting divas, moguls and hangers-on hopped off their motorboats for the opening of the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, with all shades flipped up to gander at the star of the day: actress Salma Hayek, who was presenting her long-toiled-over biopic "Frida."
Hayek says she woke up every day for years thinking about a film on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, whose sometimes sad and peculiar life story seemed to contain just the right combination of elements to never get made.
"A love story about a hairy woman and a fat man," Hayek said Thursday, listing some of the salient elements of the plot. "They were communists. She was bisexual. It is a period piece.
"It was not attractive to most people."
But eventually the tide turned amid growing public interest in Kahlo's life, her hauntingly surreal self-portraits and her relationship with her husband, the portly left-wing muralist Diego Rivera. In the end, Madonna wanted to make a Frida picture and so did Jennifer Lopez.
Yet it was Hayek who ended up as Frida when the clapper board snapped.
"Today, I'm very happy to be here. But it's not the most exciting day of my life," Hayek told a news conference before Thursday's gala opening. "The day I showed up at the set--that was the most exciting."
"That feeling will not be topped by anything else."
The two-hour picture, by longtime theater director Julie Taymor, tells Kahlo's life in Mexico in the early 20th century, and features a mess of stars, including Alfred Molina, Ashley Judd, Geoffrey Rush, Antonio Banderas and Edward Norton, who co-wrote the screenplay.
Taymor's dark 1999 film "Titus" made some imagine that "Frida" could turn out a gloomy and inaccessible drama. But she said Thursday that her aim was to make a movie that would be watched and enjoyed by a large audience.
"You have to look for the personal in this story," she said. "It's one of the greatest romantic stories I'd ever come across--that's what attracted me."
Attraction on Thursday may have been focussed on "Frida," but film posters plastered around the island reminded of what was to come: more than 75 feature films, from Hollywood to art-house, as well as dozens of shorts and retrospectives.
The Lido was already buzzing with action--and most of all with the sound of bicycles zipping by, as black-suited execs with cigars plugging their lips pedaled along on the rickety rental bikes that are the vehicle of choice on this thin island off central Venice.
If these unusual bicyclists weren't enough to show that things were under way, the disembarking of stars did the rest.
Sophia Loren--who hasn't attended Venice for years--zipped in on a little motorboat Thursday morning before placing a big kiss on the cheek of her son, Edoardo Ponti, whose first feature film, "Between Strangers," debuts here. Other big names making the paparazzi jostle were to include Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow, Harrison Ford and Julianne Moore.
Among the other major films at the 59th Venice Film Festival were "Road to Perdition," starring Hanks and Paul Newman and directed by Sam Mendes of "American Beauty"; Steven Soderbergh's "Full Frontal," an experimental film with Julia Roberts and many other stars; as well as Liliana Cavani's "Ripley's Game," starring John Malkovich.
Plus, dozens of international art films--among them "Lilja 4-Ever" by highly touted Swedish director Lukas Moodysson and Italian director Michele Placido's "A Journey Called Love"--were battling it out for a Golden Lion prize that in some cases may offer the only chance for a film to get wide distribution.
The awards ceremony comes Sept. 8, on the festival's last day, when the jury headed by Chinese actress Gong Li will hand out the main prizes, while a second jury will award prizes in the Upstream category for more experimental films.
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