VENICE, Italy (AFP) — "I'm Not There," a biopic of folk icon Bob Dylan in which he is conspicuously absent but omnipresent, should "wash over you like a dream", the film's director Todd Haynes said Tuesday.
Viewers should not "get too bogged down in the literal connections to Dylan and let it take you somewhere", Haynes told reporters of his ambitious work that channels Dylan through seven characters and premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
"Let it wash over you and sort of take you like a dream," he said.
Beginning with a black orphan who calls himself Woody Guthrie (Carl Franklin) and passing through Jude, a rising (male) star played by Cate Blanchett who abandons protest music to embrace amplified rock, to the enigmatic Billy (Richard Gere), the characters incarnate Dylan through the contrasting phases of his life and times.
The device evokes the kaleidoscopic era that shaped the musician, the stampeded star, the counter-culture icon, the born-again Christian, and the man himself.
The film flows between characters and genres -- dramatisation, documentary, TV broadcast -- as it spans three decades of America's cultural history, "an era that sort of defined Bob Dylan and that he defined", Haynes said.
The title tune "I'm Not There" exists only on bootleg copies of the 1967 "Basement Tapes," made as Dylan was recovering from a motorcycle accident in 1966 that signalled his retreat from the "central spotlight", he added.
The soundtrack is made up almost entirely of songs from Dylan's back catalogue, with a few new versions of better known songs performed by contemporary artists and Dylan classics "All Along the Watchtower" and "Visions of Johanna."
"This is the first dramatic film (Dylan) has permitted anyone to do on his life," Haynes said, attributing the honour to the film's "open structure, something that will keep expanding rather than reducing his life" to a finite story.
The song "I'm Not There" is a "beautiful kind of perfect way to describe this film", Haynes said. "Every time you try to touch him he's not there."
Gere, who has two films in this year's festival -- the other being "The Hunting Party" about the search for Bosnian Serb fugitive Radovan Karadzic -- acknowledged that the script was "very bizarre."
"You had to know a little about Bob Dylan to decipher the script," he said.
After he first read his part, he said he asked Haynes: "What the fuck is this character?" but then "had an intuitive sense of what I was doing with the film."
Dylan "had a 360-degree influence certainly on my life", he said.
Blanchett, who plays the part most resembling Dylan himself, was "terrified", Haynes said, noting: "It was a very scary challenge for her."
The Venice prizewinners will be announced on Saturday and a French film has emerged as a front-runner for the top Golden Lion award.
"La Graine et le Mulet" (Grain of Life) by Tunisian-born French director Abdellatif Kechiche tells the story of a grandfather who beats the odds by setting up a couscous restaurant on a boat.
The movie has top marks from Italian film critics as well as from the public according to the festival newsletter Ciak.
Also high in the critics' estimation is the US film "Redacted" by Brian De Palma about the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by US soldiers.
The world's oldest film festival is marking its 75th anniversary this year with 23 films in competition including a "surprise" entry to be screened for the press on Wednesday.
This year will see the festival's first Queer Lion Award for the best film with a homosexual or trans-gender theme. Twelve films are in the running, including two in the main competition: Kenneth Branagh's "Sleuth" and Andrew Dominik's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."
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