VENICE, Italy (AFP) — Quirky US director Wes Anderson will unveil his fraternal bonding odyssey "The Darjeeling Limited" at the Venice film festival on Monday.
Three brothers embark on a train journey across India in search of each other, their mother and themselves in this whimsical adventure flick.
Also Monday, China's Jiang Wen will offer "Taiyang Zhaochang Shengqi" (The Sun Also Rises), a quartet of stories that dovetail together in the end.
And Tunisian-born French director Abdellatif Kechiche proposes his take on the life of a French-Arab family in France in his "La Graine et Le Mulet" (The Secret of the Grain), about a grandfather who wants to set up a restaurant on a disused boat.
Sunday saw the premiere of Woody Allen's out-of-competition "Cassandra's Dream," a tragedy with a tinge of farce involving two brothers who get in over their heads thanks to the machinations of their wealthy uncle.
"I've always been interested in murder and the dark side of drama," Allen told a news conference. "Murder and guilt are classic ingredients of drama ... and murder is one of the tools that playwrights and filmmakers have used for centuries."
The uncle, played by Tom Wilkinson, gets the brothers -- Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor -- on board for the murder plot, preying on their weaknesses, one for a woman and the other for gambling.
Guilt -- both comic and pathetic -- enters the mix to deepen the tragedy in this out-of-competition selection.
"I've always worked with guilt. It's a subject that lends itself to both sides of the coin," whether comic or tragic, said the 71-year-old creator of "Annie Hall," "Crimes and Misdemeanours" and "Match Point."
"Life itself ... is a tremendously tragic event, I mean a real mess, but it has its comic moments," he added.
Murder was also centre stage in the premiere Sunday of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" with Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck.
The two-and-a-half-hour saga explores the complex relationship between the charismatic outlaw and his admirer turned traitor.
A snivelling Affleck as Robert Ford gives fear every dimension possible in the scenic piece, while Pitt manages some humility along with the bravado.
Sunday's selections marked a sharp change of mood from the previous two days of the festival, which were dominated by two films on the Iraq war.
On Saturday, Oscar-winning Canadian director Paul Haggis unveiled "In the Valley of Elah," showing the harrowing toll the war is taking on returning US soldiers.
It came just a day after "Redacted," Brian De Palma's dramatisation laying out the shocking facts of a rape and multiple murder in Iraq for which Private First Class Jesse Spielman was sentenced last month to 110 years in prison.
Both films explore the conditions, attitudes and stresses experienced by US soldiers in Iraq and both directors said they felt the US public was being kept in the dark about the war.
Saturday's lineup also included British director Ken Loach's "It's a Free World," about a young woman, Angie, who gets sacked from an employment agency and decides to set up one of her own along with her flatmate Rosie.
Set in a down-and-out section of London plagued by gangs and full of job-hungry migrants, the film paints a dual portrait of determination and desperation.
Angie starts out making a better life for herself with apparent empathy for the workers, but greed catches up with her.
The world's oldest film festival, marking its 75th anniversary this year, runs through Saturday.
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