“Who are you waiting for?” the elderly American man asked a clutch of tweens on the street in front of the Sala Grande, the Venice Film Festival’s main theater on the Lido, early Monday afternoon.
“Harry Styles!” they all chirped, their purple umbrella blocking the midday sun.
“Is he American?”
“English!” the girls said in unison.
“Can you sing one of his songs?”
Elena Bufalari, the oldest of the bunch at 14, broke out into Styles’s hit “As It Was.”
“Ah yes, I think I know his music,” the man said.
Six hours before the premiere of Don’t Worry Darling, a stylish psychological thriller starring Styles, Florence Pugh, and Olivia Wilde—the movie’s director and Styles’s romantic partner—there was a sea of teenage girls camping out in the street, thousands of them, waiting to get a glimpse of pop’s number-one heartthrob. Elena and her 13-year-old cousin Gaia rose at 5 a.m., and had Elena’s mother drive them five hours from their home in Marche, in central Italy, to Venice. The girls both had Harry Styles’s “Love On Tour” T-shirts, as did their new camp-out friend, Marta Franceschini, a 13-year-old from Lucca. All three were wearing Converse All-Star high-tops. All three had seen Styles’s show in Bologna in July.
And all three were “super excited” that Styles was returning to the silver screen, following his role in 2017’s Dunkirk.
“I know this was his dream,” said Gaia.
“And I know he’ll do a great job,” said Elena. “Because he’s Harry Styles.”
If there was any question that the pandemic was over in the public’s mind, it evaporated during the Venice Film Festival this year. Since its opening on August 31, the theaters have been packed, and despite the pre-screening announcement strongly encouraging mask-wearing, hardly a soul has donned one.
The fan crush for Timothée Chalamet on Friday night for the premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s cannibalism love story Bones and All*—*yes, you read that right—was mighty impressive, with hordes of mask-less teenagers not only lining the barricades along the red carpet, but also on the bridge above the canal where his boat arrived, and in the hotel corridor they thought he might take to the theater. When he appeared in his scarlet Haider Ackermann halter top and skinny pants, their screaming reached Beatle-mania volume.
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