Venice Film Festival Continues: More Fits, a Little Spit, and a Whole Lot of Drama

UPDATE, 9/6/2022: Florence Pugh aka Miss Flo has arrived, and we’ve updated this slideshow with all the latest from the long weekend.

Ah, Venice. The City of Water, Queen of the Adriatic, Serenissima! Once a year (for the last 79 years) the 1,200-year-old Italian city clears its canals so that the rich, famous, and hired-by-brands-to-attend may celebrate themselves and each other for making some neat little movies.

The city’s aquatic, one-of-a-kind layout is what really makes the Venice Film Festival so...extra special. At any other film festival, premiere, award show, etc, we only get to see celebrities on the red carpet. We can’t know if they arrived in a car, a limo, a hummer, a private helicopter, took an Uber, skateboarded, or just walked. They have but one chance to flaunt their wealth and beauty and remind us all that we’ll never have as much money as them. But in Venice, they get to be photographed rolling up to the festival in handcrafted water taxis via beautiful urban canal, while flapping their hands at all us ordinaries as if we all live in the same tax bracket.

Never forget, the ultimate Venice arrival moment:

I love it all. Let’s take a look at all the notable red carpet moments and arrivals this year, so far.

Is all the Don’t Worry Darling drama real? Fake? Exaggerated? Is the cast milking it for shits and giggles and buzz around their movie? I don’t know. And maybe we’ll never know. What I do know is, if I were the star of a highly-anticipated, controversy-clouded film—this is absolutely what I would wear to get everyone to shut the fuck up for second and simply focus on me.

I’m not gonna’ lie, I googled, “Is yellow Florence Pugh’s least favorite color?” I didn’t learn much, except that in 2019 Pugh tweeted, “certain people make me feel colors.” The tweet then explains that orange makes her feel good, and purple is murky. So maybe Wilde is going for something close to orange? Or she’s going for a whole Big Bird thing. The eight-foot, two-inch canary does sing, “Everyone Makes Mistakes.” IDK.

His wave says, “Hello Venice.” But that smirk says, “I’m about to spit on my castmate at the premiere of my movie.”

This is the laugh of someone who’s young, beautiful, talented, AND friends with Taylor Swift. (But honestly, girl, you look incredible. Love to see people thriving, despite being stalked by Vecna and getting caught in The Upside Down.)

This is the crazy thing about the Venice film festival—stars who you haven’t seen or heard about in years just pop up out of the canals. What was the last movie Penélope Cruz starred in? Seriously, I’m asking. Find me on Twitter and DM the answer, and I’ll Venmo you five bucks.

No words, just “Da ba dee da ba di.” Now I want a blue house with a blue little window, a blue corvette, a blue world, a blue girlfriend, and just everything everywhere in my life to be this blue all the time. She wins this whole festival for me.

There she is! The only member of the Don’t Worry Darling cast who seemingly isn’t causing any drama. And there’s Chris Pine, who rose to the top of the internet’s list of Best Chrises in Hollywood this weekend, beating out Evans, Hemsworth, and obviously Pratt. Congrats to them both.

Great to see you, Phoebe! Where have you been? Didn’t Amazon give you like $20 million after you won 1,000 Emmys to make us more content? Where is that? Any updates? I’m not joking.

Also, I need to know where I can get that sheer shirt, immediately, to hang in my closet next to the black Fleabag jumpsuit that you also made me buy.

Here are two of Hollywood’s hottest young starlets wearing two of the most boring black dresses that any red carpet has ever seen. It’s not the Venice Funeral Festival, my girls.

For someone who loves sequin jumpsuits, bright pink, feather boas, and suspenders, I expected much more than a navy suit with a super long, super-pointy collar. Perhaps he knew that he’d be giving us a lot more to talk about than his outfit?

This is cute! In an Easter Sunday, headed to my great aunt’s house, gotta’ make a play for getting named in the will, kind of way.

This makeup. This dress. This stare...is the look of someone who’s getting back together with Bradley Cooper.

For someone who recently talked about how she barely has any money, Sweeney certainly looks like she’s swimming in decades of generational wealth. I can’t hate, this arrival is pretty iconic (though not Gaga level iconic, which I’m still waiting to see this year).

A red, backless, halter jumpsuit with a crushed velvet neck scarf. It’s giving Britney Spears in her “Oops, I Did It Again” era. It’s giving red hot chili pepper. It’s giving genderfluid Salsa dancer emoji. This is much too fun and too fearless for a guy promoting a cannibal romance movie who told festival press on Friday, “I think societal collapse is in the air.” Timothée, babe, looks like you’re doing OK.

We can’t sit with you. Fully get it. Apologies for the disturbance.

It’s Little Red Riding (up in a Gondola) Hood. Did the bag and the lipstick and the shoes and tights all have to be the same shade of red? Whatever, she’s gorgeous, props for committing to the bit.

It’s coastal grandmother meets your actual grandmother welcoming you onto her yacht. She waves with such enthusiasm. And look at that smile! Have you ever been this happy about anything in your life? (Gonna need that lime jumpsuit, honestly.)

The jury president knew exactly what to wear to ensure everyone at the film festival knew she was going to be judging the fuck out of their little arthouse passion-project films. A cape says, “I am royal and I am ruthless.”

Hey! It’s your best friend’s chill little brother. It’s your cool part-time-musician-full-time-barista who always remembers your order. It’s your boss’s fresh-out-of-college idiot son who was recently hired for the job you’d been working towards for six years. He tells you he knows he’s a nepotism hire, and he’s so sorry. But also if you could just please get him those files and a quick cappuccino and maybe some Chik-Fil-A—if you’re going out anyway—within the hour, that’d be sweet man.

*choked on my own tongue*

Sorry, just one more. It’s like she traveled to us from the birth of the universe, her dress collecting all the colors and nebulas and supernovas of a billion galaxies. The dress was designed by Christopher John Rogers, but it was clearly destined for Jodie Turner-Smith. Bless us all.

I loved a humbled celebrity, but honestly Greta, you are an Oscar-nominated director wearing literal pajamas on a boat to a film festival. Like, I love you, but you and I should not be wearing the same thing right now.

This is more like it. Thank you to Jodie Turner-Smith for acknowledging our existence with a wave and for livening up Greta’s funereal boat arrival photos. We’re not worthy. Spit on us if you must.

Hahaha we tricked you into clicking on a slideshow that turned out to be an altar to Jodi Turner-Smith, not sorry.

And we’re back down on Earth. ...Hillary? Hi? Clinton walked the red carpet for the premiere of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise wearing...this? Honestly, she can go to all the film festivals in the world if it keeps her from playing any more legal games with Kim Kardashian.

We could probably call Ambrosio a super duper model at this point. The number of miles she’s clocked on international runways is definitely in the thousands, she’s got a couple of kids, I think she has a swimwear line. This is all to say that she’s earned the right to be a little boring on the red carpet. However, the dress’s details are very interesting and I’m sure it took a handful of seamstresses hundreds of hours to create—that’s who I really want to start seeing on the red carpet.

The Italian director is a fun-loving guy who’s a man of the people and just happy to be here. Nice!

But then he remembers that he is rich and can do whatever he wants. This is also how I would act all the time if I had money and clout and cameras waiting to capture my every (charmingly whacky!) move. Good for him.

I spy a new trend for 2023: sprouting flower boobs. Please excuse me while I fertilize my own cleavage.

I don’t think the Free the Nipple movement is quite as urgent or necessary in Italy. But we always appreciate a former Italian supermodel standing up for the oppressed nipples around the world.

I no longer know what Emma Chamberlain does. (She quit Youtube, right? And TikTok? Can she still be an influencer if she no longer has a platform on which to influence?) But she does a red carpet quite well. I really don’t love the dress, honestly—it’s giving me some slight PTSD to when ruched dresses were kind of in style in the early aughts; but I love the overall vibe. Unfortunately, there were no water taxi photos of Emma, proving she is still, of the people.

I had to Google her name (she’s an Italian singer-songwriter) but THIS is how you should be arriving at the Venice Film Festival—wearing a huge sun hat (not a fucking hair scarf, Sydney Sweeney). A pants fit that’s a little glam, a little comfy, a little bejeweled, a little sheer, with just a little cape. Maximum effort meets minimum effort. A+++