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Translation by Simona

VENICE MOVIE FESTIVAL, article written by Simonetta Robiony

People standing and mystical adoration at Johnny Depp's press conference in the Casino, the young American star who has been the leading character in many Tim Burton's movies, but also in the very recent "Chocolat". Former musician with the "Kids" band and also former television-star in "21 Jump Street" series, he the handsome and damned icon of contemporary Hollywood. But, annoyed by the American society, he left Hollywood to live with his wife Vanessa Paradis and his little daughter, in a country house near Paris. He had already been in Venice just once, for an hour and a half: this was the right occasion to come back and be amazed by this city. A smile and shining eyes, hairs in a pony-tail, moustaches, on his head a rigid felt hat he has been wearing since many years ago, wearing a big exotic scarf, Depp is similar to a post-modern Pecos Bill, the very image of a hero, but also the very image of an anti-hero. He is the star in the Hughes brothers' "From Hell", a movie about Jack The Ripper, and he says he read with passion many documents about the first serial killer in our era. This because, when he was a kid, he had been really impressed by something he saw about Jack The Ripper in TV. But that's not all. He says he admired the Hughes brothers since their first movie "Menace II Society", for the big care they put in every detail, a sort of obsession that in Prague and on the set took them to have London Whitechapel streets paved with stony slabs temporarily removed from the old center of the city.

-What did you like more in this police inspector you portray?-
-The fact he could always have a cigarette in his lips.-
-But he is also an opium-smoker.-
-Of course, he heals the tormenting wounds in his heart with opium. By the way, did you know in that period you could normally buy opium and hashish in a London chemistry?-
-Which was the biggest negative aspect which made you decide to leave your country?-
-My country gives no importance to instruction. Without culture you come to be coarse and that takes you to violence. That's no good at all.-
-How could you build such a brilliant career?-
-I do only what I like. Leading roles, secondary roles: if I like the author of a movie, all the rest has no importance.-
-What are you working at, now?-
-On nothing. I'm working as a father, the most important thing for me.-
-And then?- -I think I'll be in a love story about a executioner.-
-Who are your models?-
-I have none. I don't go often to the cinema and know nothing about my colleagues. I like some actors of the past. The character actor Lon Chayne, for example. John Barrymore, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, surely.-

VENICE MOVIE FESTIVAL, article by Alessandra Lavatesi

Nobody ever discovered the real identity of Jack The Ripper, who in the autumn of the year 1888 killed in a very ferocious way five prostitutes. With his actions he made dizzily widen the newspapers circulation and became the first media-killer in history. The echo of these truculent facts was so loud that they inspired many studies. The thesis that, under the mask of the legendary serial killer, there was the English Real family was accepted, among others, by Alan Moore, author of the comic strips "From Hell"('99). It's exactly this work that inspired the last movie of Venice film festival, by Allen and Albert Hughes. It might seems strange that the Detroit twins, authors of a first movie like "Menace II Society", settled in Los Angeles in Watts black ghetto, now made a costume movie. But, even if Jack's victims have white skin, the miserable lives of the common people in the intolerant eighteenth-century London, must have seemed to the two cinematographers not so different from those of the Afro-American minority. And such a troubled story must have seemed perfect to somebody like them.

The leading character, inspector Fred Abberline, has the inductive perspicacity and the drug addiction of a Sherlock Holmes, but, and this lacks in Holmes figure, a skill at foreseeing events and a sense of pietas for the human unhappiness around him. He is played by Johnny Depp and his romantic portrayal would be enough to ensure the public appraisal, among a good British cast, one for all the excellent Ian Holm as Sir Gull, Court surgeon. While the prostitutes die one after the other, eviscerated by a man in tail-coat, whose face we never see; Abberline, who fell in love with one of them, sweet Mary (Heather Graham), understands that the killer follows a precise ritual. So he discovers that under the murders there is a political plot. In White Chapel setting, where the real events took place, scrupulously reconstructed in Prague by the scenographer Martin Childs, the Hughes display with a wonderful effectiveness this Victorian detective story, dark and truculent.