At the Greek and Italian Film Festivals - 🎥 Janice Tong embraces a Trilogy: Life's Labyrinths, Part 3 - THE TIME IT TAKES (IL TEMPO CHE CI VUOLE) (Francesca Comencini, Italy, 2024)

 

1. Nyhterinos ekfonitis | Athens Midnight Radio (2024) Greece, Directed by Renos Haralambidis (Click to read)
2. La grazia (2025) Italy, Directed by Paolo Sorrentino (Click to read)
3. Il tempo che ci vuole | The Time it Takes (2024) Italy | France, Directed by Francesca Comencini  

Il tempo che ci vuole | The Time it Takes 

Deeply personal and infinitely magical, The Time it Takes is a poetic reflection on childhood and parenthood, life and living life. The exploration of the precious time spent with her father, Luigi, writer-director Francesca Comencini, provides a fictionalised version of their story, unvarnished. From their enchanted beginning when she was still a young girl on the film set of her father’s television series, The Adventures of Pinocchio in 1972, to the trackless and problematic years as drug-dependent teen when Luigi also experienced his first onset of Parkinson's disease, which eventually brought about his death in 2007, and finally coming full-circle with Francesca becoming a single mother and a successful film director in her own right. This film is an homage to her father, Luigi Comencini, a well-known post-war Italian director, and a love story to the redemptive and healing powers of cinema. The title is like an epitaph, that speaks of the time it takes for any relationship to flourish, riding the rough patches with the golden hours, shared glories and failures, all of life’s ups and downs; and signals, also, to the time needed, a certain distance, and maturation of Francesca, to find her voice, so that she can tell their story.  

I first saw this film in our hotel room in Milan this year in May. Without knowing any Italian, the lyrical lines in the script were lost, but not so, the sensitive and courageous performances of Romana Maggiora Vergano as the troubled teenage/adult Francesca and the wonderfully enigmatic Fabrizio Gifuni, who portrayed, with acuity, the sharp-eyed intellectual, and gradually-aging father, Luigi. In fact, the spark between these two actors and their shared love for each other was palpable, there was something incredibly tender and vulnerable between them that required no words. 

Luigi Comencini (Fabrizio Gifuni), Francesca Comencini (Romana Maggiora Vergano)
The Time it Takes/Il tempo che ci vuole

The second time I saw this film, only a few months later at the Italian Film Festival, was on the big screen, and the experience was deeply affecting – it has so much heart, and just the right amount of whimsy. The fact that there seemed to be no other siblings or adults in the life of this father and daughter duo is what is to be loved about this film. You enter into what is purely their world – this cocoon that can sometimes get a little claustrophobic. But regardless, it is a universe of make believe – from the moment  that young Francesca (Anna Mangiocavallo) was on the set of her father’s shoots, the illusory world of cinema unfolds in the eyes of an 8 year old: dreamic, fantastical, pure magic, where everything is larger than life, and all things are possible. Their story parallels that of The Adventures of Pinocchio, (in real life, Luigi’s reminiscence of his time spent on the shoot, which lasted over the course of a year, was recalled, in one of his last interviews, as his happiest in his entire life), with all the trials and tribulations that came to Pinocchio, and so too, for Francesca, as she entered into adulthood and learned the meaning of rebellion. 

Against that was what held her fascination as a child: her father’s world of classical music and books, his drive to be productive, his fierce intellect; all propelled Francesca’s need for escape. Her first experiences of love and then drugs came with the drive in the seventies where ‘everything about rock n roll is about death’. Some of these scenes were beautifully accentuated by Neil Young's sweet and tender vocals to Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black). Pushed further towards the abyss with the death of her lover, Luigi had little choice but to take her away to Paris to ‘dry out’. These turbulent times were mirrored by Italy’s destabilising ‘years of lead’, between the late 60s and the late 80s when the whole country was marked by a wave of social and political unrest. When I was watching the film, I cannot help but recall the brilliant but tough television series Exterior Night (2022) directed by Marco Bellocchio, where Gifuni was Aldo Moro – he portrayed Moro’s tragic and shocking demise with grave sensitivity. Small fragments of this other character haunted Comencini’s film, likely intentional, a clever piece of casting either way.  

As troubling as this may sound, perhaps the best scenes in the film were the most difficult ones…Luigi’s dependence on drugs to keep his Parkinson’s disease at bay and Francesca’s dependence on drugs. She was an addict. Yet neither yielded to their weaknesses. In these scenes, those wretched scenes outside the bathroom door, the close-up of Vergano’s puffy face and shadowed eyes, where we glimpse a knife’s edge excising the emotional artery, are but transcendent, of rare grace.

Romana Maggiora Vergano

Then, the tender scenes in Paris where the weakened Luigi, his body wrecked by the disease that will eventually take his life, trails behind Francesca. He is her shadow, her protector, following her to the ends of the earth, even if they are to be swallowed by a whale (the monster within us). Luca Bigazzi’s cinematography treads a careful balance between private and public worlds. 

At its core, this film reinvents the filial relationship in the tradition of Pinocchio, there, between father and son, here, between father and daughter. And so it should be the case. Luigi had four daughters by his wife, Guilia: Paola, who is a costumier cum production designer and had worked on all his films since 1980 (in fact all his daughters had trained under him); Eleonora who is a producer; Cristina and Francesca, both of whom assisted their father at film sets, and both established directors in their own right. 

It matters little whether or not you knew of the real-life father-daughter pair, in fact, all this is of no consequence…because ultimately, this film is a poem, it is a poem about life. Its working title was First Life, Then Cinema, and Francesca’s delicate tribute to life (and cinema) was not lost on us.

 A lovely review of Comencini’s film in Italian (you can use Google translate on the page) begins with a quote by Giovanni Pascoli’s famous essay on fanciullino or the little child – where he described how poetry (and here, cinema) should be sought with a sense of amazement and wonder, like that of a little child’s…and that there is an inner child in all of us, even the bankers or politicians, and for us to rediscover that sense of spontaneous mystery in all things.  

What a beautiful reminder to us all…