Venice Film Festival kicks off, opened by Tim Burton

Welcome to the Afterlife or its waiting room... This is what the first two films opening the 81st Venice Film Festival tell us: Tim Burton's Beetlejuice , Out of Competition, which officially kicks off the Festival, and Despite by Valerio Mastandrea, which opens the Orizzonti section. Fear not, however: this is an Afterlife in which one can also laugh and joke, as well as take cheap shots, just like in life.

But let's start with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the return of a great Tim Burton who only takes his cue from 1988's Spiritello porcello, forerunner of his gothic and funny, scary and gentle characters. That world of spirits, of comings and goings in the Underworld and pischedelic monsters, not too offensive if you know how to take them in the right direction, has created hordes of fans. Several were seen at the Lido today wearing black and white striped shirts, like the suit worn by the protagonist, and dark variations on the original theme.

Thirty-six years after that cult film, the Deetz family returns home to Winter River. Lydia (Winona Ryder) is now a TV star on an occult show, flanked by her manager and partner Rory (Justin Theroux), who is disliked by the rest of the family. But while taping an episode of her show, Lydia is summoned by a hostile presence in the audience. Distraught, shortly afterwards Lydia finds out from her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) that her father Charles Deetz has died in a freak accident. The shocking news is then further devastated by Lydia's difficult relationship with her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). The latter, taking refuge in the attic of the family home, discovers the city's mysterious model and portal to the Afterlife, which could free Beetlejuice simply by conjuring its name twice...

The old Tim Burton of Edward Scissorhands (1990), Big Fish (2003), The Corpse Bride (2005) is back with a lighter, more laugh-out-loud grotesque, with a desire to be in the contemporary world. Between the good and the bad, the dead and the living, he is keen to punish above all those who spectacularise every event, the world of trashy TV and influencers, to whom he gives a bad ending to the applause of the critics.

With a strong soundtrack fully amalgamated with the plot, which more than once cracks a smile at the absurdity of the scene, Burton inserts a small monologue in Italian by Beetlejuice. Maliciously, one thinks of the presence in the film of the statuesque companion Monica Bellucci, in the guise of Beetlejuice's vengeful ex-wife Delores. Instead, when asked at the press conference, Burton shrugs off any comment on the connection, saying that he has always loved Italy and that he spontaneously thought of Italian as a foreign language to be inserted into the all-English speech. Bellucci, who rightly so to please an international audience answers only in English even to questions in Italian, tells of her good fortune to have been accepted into Burton's acting family and emphasises how this film is a beautiful story of solidarity between three generations of women, particularly important at this time of female affirmation.