The 79th Venice International Film Festival is set to open with Noah Baumbach’s new movie, White Noise, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.
The festival will begin on August 31st, and it has been revealed that Baumbach’s forthcoming outing will take the revered premiere spot, which has housed a stream of masterpieces over the years.
Three years ago, the emerging director also premiered the Oscar-winning Marriage Story at the festival. In the interim, Baumbach signed a multi-year partnership with Netflix, but this, evidently, has had none of the anticipated backlash, with the festival despite it often condemning the rise of Netflix and streamed content’s encroachment on cinema.
The film is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel of the same name. The book itself comes with the following synopsis: “Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life – a life that is going well enough until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an Airborne Toxic Event, and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear: his own mortality.”
Continuing: “White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which Don DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism. It captures the particular strangeness of life lived when the fear of death cannot be denied, repressed or obscured and ponders the role of the family in a time when the very meaning of our existence is under threat.”
Driver and Gerwig take the lead roles, while Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam and May Nivola, and Andre L. Benjamin (Andre 3000) join them in an ensemble cast.
“It was worth waiting for the certainty that the film was finished to have the pleasure to make this announcement,” Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera explained. He added that the film “examines our obsessions, doubts, and fears as captured in the 1980s, yet with very clear references to contemporary reality.”
