VENICE - Brad Pitt rides into town on Sunday as Jesse James while Woody Allen and French director Claude Chabrol offer dark comedies out of competition at the Venice film festival.
"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" promises to explore the complex relationship between the charismatic outlaw and his admiring killer, according to New Zealand director Andrew Dominik. "The film is a poetic meditation on a murder and its consequences," he s09/02/2007 01:46 GMTays.
Also Sunday, Allen premieres "Cassandra's Dream," a tragedy bordering on farce involving two brothers who get in over their heads thanks to the machinations of their wealthy uncle played by Tom Wilkinson.
Chabrol's "La Fille Coupee en Deux" (The Girl Cut in Two) is a tale about a woman torn between the man she loves and the one she marries. "Depravity is the art of turning good into evil," Chabrol says of the film.
The selections mark a sharp change of mood from the last two days of the festival, which were dominated by two films on the Iraq war.
On Saturday, Academy Award-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.
"During Vietnam we had terrific journalists doing their job," Haggis said. "We were seeing it on television. Now we don't have it."
In his film, Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon play the parents of a soldier who goes missing shortly after returning from Iraq.
The father's search for their son, aided by a feisty police detective played by Charlize Theron, turns into a murder mystery that slowly uncovers hard truths about the Iraq war and its traumatising effects on US soldiers.
In discovering the brutality of which his son was capable, Jones' character, a former military MP, has to upturn long-held beliefs.
Haggis -- whose movie "Crash" won the best picture Oscar last year -- said he wanted the film to be "political but not partisan," noting that he wrote it "through the eyes of a very proud American who believes he knows -- who knows right from wrong."
De Palma said: "All the images we have of our war are completely constructed -- whitewashed, redacted. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against 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.
"You get wrapped up in it, you get greedier and greedier," said Kierston Wareing of her character.
Loach said the exploitation of poor immigrants is not a mere "force of nature" resulting from globalisation. "It's important that we don't let them get away with this, that some people have to be exploited and others get extremely rich."
09/02/2007 01:46 GMT