Over the course of the last half-century or so, Venice has lost well over half its population, while its tourism industry has exploded to the point where it financially supports a majority of the natives. One of the great old cities of Europe has devolved, in the eyes of many of its die-hard residents, into one mammoth tourist trap, a sputtering nightmare of congested canals littered with obnoxious, gas-guzzling motor boats, tacky bars and restaurants, and other cheap entities out to separate tourists from their hard-earned cash.
What's wrong with Venice? Can it be saved, possibly by the creation of an underwater metro connecting it to the mainland? Just about everyone interviewed in the documentary The Venetian Dilemma has an opinion, usually one coated with bitterness and resentment, and it appears to take little prodding to get them to vent their frustrations. Directors Carole and Richard Rifkind document a cross-section of native activists out to save Venice's soul before it turns into a glorified theme-park attraction. Chief among the film's cantankerous heroes are a sassy, pregnant graphic designer out to shame the powers that be into providing adequate health-care facilities for its mothers, and a writer battling the massive proliferation of tourism-fueled motorboats.
But while the filmmakers do an excellent job of outlining Venice's various crises and the grassroots campaigns addressing them, they fail to dramatize the situation in a particularly compelling way. Part of the problem lies in the film's lack of visual style: It seems almost perverse to document one of Europe's oldest, most beautiful attractions using the crappiest of modern technologies, digital video and digi-Beta. In a strange way, however, the project's stylistic homeliness also serves a thematic function, forcing audiences to perceive Venice as a place full of cranky, impassioned locals, not the decadently gorgeous aesthetic wonderland of popular imagination. The Venetian Dilemma aims to be simultaneously a poignant elegy for a fading way of life and a muckraking political manifesto, but its noble intentions are occasionally undermined by its ugliness.