Synopses taken from the catalogue of the 64th Venice International Film Festival

published by Electa

Tony Gilroy

Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is an in-house “fixer” at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York. At the behest of the firm’s co-founder Marty Bach (Sidney Pollack), Clayton, a former prosecutor from a family of cops, takes care of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen’s dirtiest work. Clayton cleans up clients’ messes, handling anything from hit-and-runs and damaging stories in the press to shoplifting wives and crooked politicians. Though burned out and discontented in his job, Clayton is inextricably tied to Kenner, Bach & Ledeen; a divorce, gambling habit, and a failed business venture have left him with mounting debt. At the agrichemical company U/North, the career of in-house counsel chief Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) rests on the multi-million dollar settlement of a class action suit that Clayton’s firm is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. When Kenner, Bach & Ledeen’s top litigator, the brilliant Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), has an apparent breakdown and subsequently tries to sabotage the entire U/North case, Michael Clayton is sent to tackle this unprecedented disaster and in doing so comes face to face with the reality of who he has become.

Peter Greenaway

Nightwatching

In 1642 the celebrated and wealthy Dutch painter Rembrandt reluctantly agrees to paint a group portrait of the Militia Company of Amsterdam Musketeers which will later be known as The Nightwatch, to discover that there is a conspiracy alive among the officers of the Militia who, now that the Spanish wars are over, are essentially burghers and merchants playing at soldiers manoeuvring for financial advantage in the richest city in Europe. Rembrandt uncovers a murder. Rembrandt’s good fortune turns. His wife, Saskia, dies. Rembrandt confronts his commissioners with his painted J’accuse, his indictment in paint of the Militia Company’s treachery. The conspirators deny the accusations in public but they plan revenge. They set out to discredit Rembrandt. They bribe his servant, Geertje, to become his mistress and destroy his reputation with his religious and bourgeois clients in a restrictive moral climate that seeks respectability. They plan his social and financial ruin. They try to blind him. As his clients and the public desert him, Rembrandt finds support and solace in a second servant, Hendrickje. The Nightwatch, exceptional in its theatrical display and manipulation of light, is Rembrandt’s most celebrated painting, though the accused were so successful in their propaganda campaign, it has taken until now to discover its real import, and to realise that although the painting consolidated Rembrandt’s reputation in cultural history as maybe the most successful painter ever in Europe, it also created the circumstances that destroyed him socially and financially in his own lifetime.

José Luis Guerin

En la ciudad de Sylvia

Summer. A young foreigner wanders through the streets of a city, spontaneously observing and sketching gestures and expressions. He is looking for a woman he met there years before, his memories of her and her image still hang over the city. This search leads him to another woman and another again yet he remains forever under the spell of the one who is absent.

Paul Haggis

In the Valley of Elah

On his first weekend back after serving in Iraq, Mike Deerfield goes missing and is reported AWOL. When Hank Deerfield, a former military MP and his wife Joan get the phone call with the disturbing news, Hank sets out to search for their son. Emily Sanders, a New Mexico police detective in the jurisdiction where Mike was last seen, reluctantly helps him in his search. As the evidence grows, her missing person’s case begins to look more and more like foul play, and soon Sanders finds herself in a fight with the military brass as she and Hank struggle to keep control of the investigation. But when the truth about Mike’s time in Iraq finally begins to emerge, Hank’s entire world is challenged and he’s forced to reevaluate longheld beliefs to solve the mystery behind his son’s disappearance.