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…

At the Greek and Italian Film Festivals - 🎥 Janice Tong embraces a Trilogy: Life's Labyrinths, Part 2 - LA GRAZIA (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2025)

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

 

Toni Servillo, La Grazia

Paolo Sorrentino’s La grazia was the second film I saw at this year’s Italian Film Festival. It was also the only film that was advertised on the site without a trailer (some weird AI-generated trailer was available upon searching on YouTube – but you could smell its fishy falsity within a couple of seconds) and the singular marketing I managed to find at the time, was an image of the back of the great Toni Servillo (Sorrentino’s chameleonic long-term collaborator), dressed formally in a black coat and hat, standing looking sideways on what looks to be a country road that leads somewhere into the distance. His gaze unseen by us, his face, in a half profile, yielded little expression, at least none that can be easily deciphered. Even the 20 word blurb gave nothing away. I entered the theatre with only a hastily glanced meaning of the words la grazia in mind.

La grazia is a word that describes not only the translation any English-speaking person would discern upon seeing the word – grace. Its variation in usage and meaning yields a complex but well-rounded description of Sorrentino’s elegant film (note he was also the writer of this film). The word signals multiple meanings concurrently: 1. Favour or benevolence in the form of goodwill; 2. Gratitude – in its signifying of thankfulness or a blessing; 3. Also, it conveys the idea of pardon or mercy in a legal sense, of clemency or formal pardon granted by the head of state; and lastly, 4. The spiritual beneficence of divine favour – where a state of grace is attained.

Just like a modern-day sorcerer, Sorrentino weaves these elements together into the life-tapestry of Servillo’s Italian President, Mariano de Santis, who is serving out the last 6 months of his 7 year term. His daughter, Dorotea (Anna Ferezzeti) runs a tight schedule for him, right down to what he is allowed to eat, (something like boiled fish and potatoes), so as to keep his weight off; a somewhat sardonic recurring theme: the president’s envy of the weightlessness of an astronaut who also has 6 months before returning to earth, and the president’s own earnt nickname of ‘reinforced concrete’ – conjuring a visual image of a slab of that heavy but dull, grey material; but really, this description is in context to his dogmatism in carrying out duties to the letter of the law. 

 

Anna Ferezzeti, La Grazia

And so, his days passed, not unkindly, like that of a groundhog, where one day blends into the next; where history weighs him down and the future is but an abyss, a void eternal in which he must surrender. Sometimes when he is up on the roof top of his residence, we couldn’t help but wonder whether he would leap off its parapet. 

 

In an echo of the eternal city where he lives, eternity is measured by the stretch of his inability to act on (seemingly) just three things: 1. To put his signature to an euthanasia bill that his daughter has prepared; 2. The decision of whether to grant pardon to a woman who has murdered her abusive husband; and 3. Whether or not to grant pardon to a man who had ended his wife’s suffering from Alzheimer's. If we go back to the marketing still for this film, we now know that, despite the straight road that leads ahead, he had turned his head to the side, and in doing so, he is offering up to himself, a different choice, a diverting path to take (somewhere off-frame). And this is how he has to navigate what remains of his term and what remains of his life – the loss of his wife, his knowledge that she has cheated on him at a much earlier juncture of their marriage, and the three things of his governance weighed on him (no amount of dieting would alleviate his heavy burden). 

But there are light-hearted moments too: in the form of his larger than life friend, Coco Valori, played here with unforgettable flair and vibrancy by Milvia Marigliano delivers to the camera a rich Fellinesque jewel that Sorrentino reveres. Other moments of hilarity come in the form of Chaplinesque caper: the red-carpeted arrival of the Portuguese prime minister, majestically broken by a sudden rain storm – all in exquisite multi-angled slow motion for our visual enjoyment – a mockery of the absurdity of formalities. Working with his long-term collaborator, Daria D'Antonio at the helm of the camera, provides just the right amount of comedy to offset the gravity of Mariano’s decisions. We mustn’t forget to mention Mariano’s new penchant for listening to rap music in the evenings on his headphones, seated in the official Cabinet’s leather and dark wood office – just when you think any seriousness was checked at the door – Sorrentino raps, to camera, perfectly. In fact, the pulsing techno music that recurs throughout the film acts as that needlepoint of balance on a scale – tipping sometimes to enjoyment, sometimes to endurance; a metaphor for one’s moral compass: the unyielding oscillation between doubt and certainty, right or wrong.

 

Toni Servillo, Paolo Sorrentino at the Venice Festival
Premiere of La Grazia

In Sorrentino’s 2024 Parthenope, a film I regard as the writer/director’s best work (sadly my sentiment was not shared by other critics), he posed this question: “what happens if you just let go?” – a profound and deeply troubling question, as most people desperately cling onto whatever they deem to be important, when really, nothing is as vital as it may seem – good looks, what other people think of you, the millstone around your neck (unless you’re one of the handful of fortunates who loves your job), politics and government, social media, or things you simply can’t change. Who dares to live authentically themselves these days (despite loud pronouncements of this achievement)? And here in La grazia, the question asked is a simpler one, but no less weighty: “who owns our days?”, a follow-up question of the former. If there is a right answer to this question, does it make it true to your current situation? For me, the dual questions posed by Sorrentino continue to linger long after the film ends. 

La grazia won 7 awards at the 82nd Venice Film Festival with Servillo taking the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. 

An interesting interview with the director at the 63rd New York Film Festival is available here.

The Italian Film Festival ran in September and October in Australia this year.

The Greek Film Festival ran in October in Australia this year.

Italian Film Festival - Sydney's supercinephile Barrie Pattison puts in the hard yards and recalls the highlights including STRANGENESS (Roberto Ando), A BRIGHTER TOMORROW (Nanni Moretti), THE LAST NIGHT OF AMORE (Franco de Stefano), LA CHIMERA (Alice Rohrwacher) and ORLANDO (Daniele Vicari)

 

NB: The 2023 Italian Film Festival ends in Sydney on October 18, some other states a week later. There are overflow sessions of the hits including some of the titles mentioned here in Barrie's report. Check out Palace Cinemas websites for details.

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This year’s Italian Film Festival (at least they generated a new St. Ali commercial) is in there stressing significance. No teen musicals, gallant swordsmen and dialect comics this year.

They did manage Mario Martone’s Laggiu qualcuno mi ama/ Somebody Down There Likes me a biography of Neapolitan comic, the late Massimo Troisi and a three movie retrospective. With a bit of luck I’ll get onto that shortly.

More characteristic was Roberto Ando’s La strangezza/ Strangeness, a coverage of Nobel Prize Winning dramatist Luigi Pirandello’s 1920s visit to his Sicilian origins. It’s a bit disturbing to find no reference in the press response to the Tavianis’ remarkable 1984 Kaos which deals with the same incident, down to the exhausting rail trip and the local crazy.

In the new film, a barbered Tony Servillo is the blocked celebrity writer coming back to his one time Catania home to confer with mentor Renato Carpentieri  but sidetracked by the death of his old wet nurse, whose funeral involves him with gravediggers, comic duo Salvatore Ficarra & Valentino Picone from l primo Natale/Once Upon a Time in Bethlehem. There are routines of two bodies allocated to the same mortuary niche and bribed bureaucrats. Turns out that the pair are staging their own local theatre piece, complete with a comic séance, extra lines for the priest whose hall they want to use and Picone, complete with moustache, rung in as the Countess character because everyone else is already on stage.

Servillo tries to hide his famous writer status but his cover is blown and he finds himself honored guest at the presentation, where audience members indignantly recognise themselves in the characters. This Kaos triggers his struggling creativity and he returns to the city to spin the mix of comic and tragic, real and illusory into his major work “Six Characters in Search of an Author” to which he invites the Sicilians. They find themselves witness to the riot the first presentation of the revolutionary work provokes. Spot Luigio Lo Cascio as the onstage director.

 

Strangeness is given the best frock coat movie mounting, with dim lit images of the kind better deployed in Bellochio’s imposing Rapito/Kidnapped, which was also on show. I covered it on its Melbourne festival outing. Despite the new production’s obvious ambitions, it falls far short of the Taviani brothers’ take on the same material.

Curiously this one plays in the same event as the most Pirandellian movie I’ve seen – Nanni Moretti’s new Il sol dell'avvenire/A Brighter Tomorrow which deliberately shuffles comic and tragic, real and unreal, movies and history. 

Moretti offers his on-screen director character thrashing about with an industry that has moved away from him. Clips of movies he cherishes, notably the Demy Lola and La dolce vita, fail to involve his associates. His proposed film of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” evokes the flawed Burt Lancaster version. Moretti’s hours long nocturnal disruption of a film set with his harangue about violence in movies or his scooter ride with shonk French producer Mathieu Almaric go with a caricatured meeting with Netflix reps.

Meanwhile, Moretti’s character isn’t aware that wife and longtime assistant Margherita Buy is seeing a shrink in order to work up the courage to leave him, as he gets stuck into the production of a film about the Fifties Russian invasion of Hungary stranding a Hungarian circus troop invited by the Italian Communist Party, who now fluctuate between an allegiance to Moscow and outrage at their barbaric conduct (no one has to mention Ukraine) while an order for fifty pounds of meat a day for the animals has to be met.

This stream is headed up by the great Silvio Orlando and Barbora Bobulova as the film’s star players, while the lead couple finds their daughter Valentina Romani an item with Polish senior citizen diplomat Jerzy Stuhr (Camera Buff) adding to the already eye popping cast. Any celebrity who happens to be left out gets to march in the final parade complete with glimpsed Trotsky banner, celebrating the ironic title – the blissful new world order following the Italians’ break with Soviet Hegemony.

 

At seventy, Moretti is still on top of his game, able to surprise, amuse and involve. This is one of the best films in the event and one of the best we are likely to see this year.

Also a class item is Franco de Stefano’s L'ultima notte di Amore/The Last Night of Amore, another cop piece, which goes with Nostalgia and Suburra to put Pierfrancisco Favino in the top bracket of Italian crime movie stars. Think a kind of sad sack Gian Maria Volonte. Favino is a thirty five year police veteran who has never had to fire his weapon on duty. That’s a key piece of plot information actually. After resuscitating a Chinese businessman following a gone wrong encounter with vice girls, he’s offered a well-paid gig like his security businessman colleague. Only trouble is that the diamond pick-up from the airport which will net him a month’s salary at a stroke, comes on Favino’s last evening on the force. It of course goes pear shaped, endangering his pension and the comfort of wife Linda Caridi  and their student daughter Skype calling from her dorm to his surprise farewell party.

 

The actual night time motorway tunnel encounter is a great suspense set piece and must have been hell on wheels to stage. The script, weaving backward and forward around it, is ingenious and original. Conviction only wilts when Caridi becomes involved in the action, not probably through the shortcomings of the performer, who registers as alert & attractive, but through the implausible device of involving the wife in all the hard man stuff.

Craft aspects impress. Notice the blows of the beating suggested as continuing in the imposing score after the visual has ended. The largely unfamiliar-face cast are spot on and the Milanese setting convincing, with the ending with Favino crossing the deserted square in front of the Cathedral particularly resonant.

I can see this one having a long life as a Euro-action classic on a par with Borsalino  or Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

On the other hand coming after her Happy as Lazarro and medium length La pupille, Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera is a letdown. It centers on young Englishman Josh O’Connor  who we learn is making his way to the manor house run by an ailing Isabella Rossellini (identifiable by her Ingrid Bergman sound-alike voice), with whose deceased daughter he had an association Rossellini approved. He has just come out of the slammer for tomb-robbing, with cops homing in on family heirlooms as property of the state. Josh is welcomed by the local hoon element for his ability to locate lootable grave sites with a divining rod. Their mysterious fence has paid his bail.

On a drunken night with the stronzi gang on the beach, he snaps back into discovery mode and they find a millennia-untouched Etruscan grave site complete with an imposing marble statue from which the experienced vandals immediately saw off the head. The foreigner is appalled… and the sound of a police siren rings out.

Developments introduce director Rohrwacher’s actress-star sister Alba, here got up glamorous, elaborating the plot. The story’s possibilities are lost in unsatisfactory wandering into unreal imagery. Josh O’Connor’s dowsing inspired visions as shots cut in upside down, following the red thread. Staging a finale in a cheery women’s co-operative in the vacant Tuscan  Riparbella station house doesn’t convince.

Curiously this is the third piece I’ve just encountered to deal with provenance in art, after Steve Martin’s novel “An Object of Beauty” and the ABC’s Brett Whiteley documentary. I don’t know whether it is a comfort to know that the process of mystifying the value of movies still has some way to go by comparison.

Director Daniele Vicari is a visitor from the Projects on the margins of Sub-Titles City. We’ve seen him passing every so often (Diaz – Don’t Clean Up This Blood is a show-stopper) but we really don’t know what he gets up to. His new Orlando deserves attention for that alone. 

This one provides an initial shock in finding once rugged juvenile Michele Placido as a plausibly stooped and surly seventy-three year old Central Italian peasant. He throws a crumpled letter into the wheelbarrow rubbish but relents and makes the requested call from the bar to his alienated son gone years from the remote village to make a new life in Brussels. They have to find a migrant worker who can understand the person who answers. For the first time in his life, Placido leaves his home only to face his son’s feet framed by part obscured coffin, leaving Placido the man’s pre-teen daughter, Angelica Krazancova’s only living relative. Complications include a black landlord who Placido treats with contempt despite the man’s sympathy and a fellow Italian social worker who has lived through the migrant experience, like the dead son, and is getting stick from his woman associate for not following regulations.

Placido, for whom the greatest satisfaction in his life is eating the food from his own land, and Krazancova who lives for her figure skating, are mutually incomprehensible. Her tantrum at the station, when he wants to take her back with him, gets him into strife with the gendarmes there and he finds himself slaving as a day laborer and still short on the rent. There are however moments like the shared pleasure of the Xmas ice festival in the square or finding the girl cooking her grandmother’s recipe, learned from her father. Despite digressions like the night at the expatriate Italians’ concertina bar, it’s made clear to Placido that his impossible options narrow to never seeing the girl again as she is swallowed by the adoption machine, where he has no say.

The piece is laid out with unrelenting clarity – legal detail, real locations, language problems. Masking the characters for COVID is in character. I’d guess it’s too deliberate for a wide audience. I was the only one in the theater that session but I defy anyone to remain uninvolved by the final scene.

This one extends a line that’s not exactly new. Since the days of Jackie Coogan and Freddy Barthololemew, we’ve seen unlikely child custodian movies. There was a spate of them with WW2 displaced persons – Tomorrow the World, The Pied Piper, The Search or Germany Year Zero. Since then however, we've had widely spaced pieces from different cultures –  Joseph Lejtes’particularly strong 1963 Dick Powell Theater ep. Apples Don’t Fall Far, Michel Simon & Alain Cohen in Claude Berri’s Le vieil homme et l'enfant/The Two of Us, Wu Ma and Kun-Hsuan Huang in Anne Hui’s Shanghai jiaqi/My American Grandson, or Richard Burton and Tatum O’Neal in Jules Dassin’s Circle of Two. Ponder a season made up of those.

Italian Film Festival 2022 - Janice Tong's first 🎥Filmic Postcard - 3/19 (Silvio Soldini, 2020), LORD OF THE ANTS ( IL SIGNORE DELLE FORMICHE, Gianni Amelio, 2022)

3/19
Bruno (Francesco Colella),  a director at the mortuary,
plays detective with Camilla (Kasia Smutniak)

My year of Italian Renaissance circa 2021 has followed me into this 2022 year of vertiginous winters, wet duplicitous spiralling days filled with worsening world news and my own (forced) professional reboot. I found solace in consuming serial TV programs at the end of each long day: Faster Than Fear, Crisis Unit, In Therapy, Irma Vep, Astrid, Don’t Leave Me, The Split, My Brilliant Friend (season 3), L’Ora,The Silence of Water, Doc, Inspector Ricciardi amongst others. Most of what I watched were German, French, British or Italian productions. Throughout the past nine months, whatever preconceptions I’ve had about Italian sentimentality were soon washed over by an almost magical discovery of something fragile and intelligent in their stories. In fact, the discovery is of something more enigmatic – akin to one’s soul – or at least, in a more recognisable form, it speaks to an open encounter with kindness (and forgive me for quoting Keanu Reeves here : “I would not want to be a part of a world where being kind is a weakness”) that becomes the fuel behind many of their stories, of personal relationships and social responsibilities. 

The first two films to be reviewed for this year’s St Ali’s Italian Film Festival, 3/19 and Lord of the Ants also have this glowing jewel, of love and humanity, or love of humanity at its core.

 

It’s not really possible to say that Camilla, played engrossingly by Kasia Smutniak (a well-known face in cinema of late, Perfect Strangers (2016), Made in Italy (2018) and Loro I and Loro II (2018)) is unhappy: she is a successful and calculating lawyer (feared and revered by her minions in equal measure) who has a rather meaningless if careless mother/daughter relationship with her university-aged daughter Adele (Caterina Forza), and the cream on top is that Camilla has settled into a semi routine, by way of a simpatico love nest with a married man, all with the comforting knowledge that this relationship wll ultimately lead nowhere.

 

3/19
Daughter and Mother
Adele (Caterina Forza), Camilla (Kasia Smutniak)

Sometimes, it only takes a small crack for things to unravel, the beat of a butterfly’s wing, or in this case, a rainy night incident where Camilla was involved in a hit and run by a motorbike. Kids on a stolen bike or kids out for a ride and didn’t see her, either way, one of the kids died, a John Doe, he is 3/19, unknown and unidentified, the third person in this predicament in 2019. 

 

The film has a slatey palette, jarring bled-out greens and hues that matched the mood of an eternal and bloodless winter; cinematographer Matteo Cocco’s angular framing of Smutniak’s equally masculine jawline made her character even more austere and flinty – all perfectly camouflaged in the Milanese backdrop of stones and histories. But as Camilla unpicked her way through this tapestry of the unknown person, their histories and connections, we realise that the seduction that gets played out in this film is not of sex or desire, but is of kindness and consideration. We are consumed by its wilderness – whether it is the forest in Camilla’s minds eye, or the sea by which the young man is buried; and in this regard, Camilla needed to desperately revolt against her own sense of decorum and habitual justice to find beauty and meaning in something completely foreign to her. 

 

Some may see that she is reborn, but I’d like to see that she’s just discovered something new within herself, perhaps something that was always there. In her nascent form, she is well matched by Bruno, the director of the mortuary. I see him as the guardian of the dead and the keeper of their secrets, the overseer of one’s last repose. Bruno is an everyman, played wonderfully by Francesco Colella, who also stars in one of my favourite recent TV series, L’Ora (currently showing on SBS) and the more gritty drama ZeroZeroZero (also on SBS). 

 

What unfolds is a personal endeavour to travel through an unknown and invisible history of a stranger, brought closer through a found photo in the pocket of the young man, and a beautiful ancient poem written in Arabic. It is as though all these things are calling out her name and binding her to a future, the constitution of family, hers, with Adele, through a lost son.

 

Lord of the Ants
Bracing for love, Luigi Lo Cascio plays the brilliant Aldo Braibanti 

Lord of the Ants also calls forth the need to belong. A thread that binds Aldo Braibanti’s story is told in elliptically with much of his desire for a certain young man, Ettore Tagliaferri, (sensitively portrayed by first-timer, Leonardo Maltese) played as a meeting of the minds and heart despite their physical attraction. And this is precisely an area  which this fictional portrayal of Braibanti’s life focuses on, the idea of plagio, translated as ‘plagiarism’. It is a mediaeval crime where one is accused of influencing another person’s mind to the extent of taking possession of it; and to imbue the other person with immoral actions and thoughts. The Italian criminal code defines it as "whoever submits a person to his own power, in order to reduce them to a state of subjection”, in order words, forcefully subjecting their will over another’s; meaning that Braibanti has to take full blame for whatever happened between him and Ettore. 

Lord of the Ants
 Three loves, Ettore (Leonardo Maltese), Aldo (Luigi Lo Cascio) and ants

 

The backstory of how the two men met was brought to life nostalgically, full of poiesis and beauty. Luigi Lo Cascio, who also starred in last year’s film festival favourite Lacci or The Ties (2020), reviewed here; is perfectly cast as Braibanti: handsome, urbane, artistically and politically active, uncompromising and (without sounding condescending) the epitome of 60s Italian intelligentsia. It is no wonder that young men and women gravitated to his poetry, visual art and dramatic theatrical experiments held in a commune at the Farnese tower of Castell'Arquato. These experiments, as well as large scale studies of ant colonies lasted for six years before he moved to Rome. The production design by Marta Maffucci as well as some of the location shots are magnificent (some scenes were reminiscent of the freedom of French New Wave cinema), and there are some brilliant anti-theatre staged sets at the commune. But for me, the first scene of the softly-spoken Aldo, in an open Roman movie theatre by the water with Ettore, reciting poetry to each other, that has the audience entranced from the very beginning.  That, and the writing.

 

Lord of the Ants
Dramaturgy, poiesis and experimental theatre at work

Most of the film is focused on the trial, and that in itself – a courtroom drama – is of historical importance. But it is through a myriad of side stories that allows us a real glimpse into the Braibanti universe: the loving relationship between Braibanti and his mother, the relationship of Ennio (played by Elio Germano, most recently we’ve seen in him Lucia’s Grace (2018) and Rose Island (2020)) a journalist sent to cover the trial by his Communist newspaper and his cousin, his cousin’s lover, the student protestors, the ‘cure’ provided by the psychiatric centre on Ettore, and even Ettore’s own naivety, spoke volumes of the 60s in Rome. In the end, though, it is the story of Braibanti and Ettore that eclipses all else; and Lo Cascio’s brilliant performance made their story so palpable and arresting to watch on the big screen. 

 

Ending this review on a side note: it’s interesting to note that director, Gianni Amelio came out as gay only a few years ago, when he was in his sixties. So I would say that this would be a very personal film, and perhaps explains why this is a fictionalised account rather than a straight biopic – in order to allow for artistic freedom and poetry. It took out 4 awards at the Venice Film Festival this year. If you’re interested in the actual trial itself, Carmen Giardina and Massimiliano Palmese directed a documentary on Braibanti's trial in 2020 called Il caso Braibanti. The film was awarded the Nastro d'Argento prize, one of Italy's most prestigious awards. But if you’re interested in a moral drama of the un-mappable human heart, then, Amelio’s film soars above all else.

 

#italianfilmfestivalis currently playing at selected Palace cinemas around Australia, finishing on the 16th October in Perth.

 

#filmfestivaleveryday#filmoftheday#jandnfilmfestival

Italian Film Festival - Barrie Pattison recommends MI VUOI BENE (Fausto Brizzo, 2019), RITORNO A COCCIA DI MORTO (Antonio Albanese, 2020) and LACCI (Daniele Lucchetti, 2020) ..and harks back to COME UN GATTO IN TANGENZIALE (Antonio Albanese, 2017)

Seems everyone's involved in an unseemly race to get their post lock-up Film Festivals up before Xmas. The Italians are traditionally heavy hitters in this area - like the Spaniards and the Iranians. A few of their celebrities are represented  in the dozen plus new titles on offer - Nanni Moretti, Elio Germani, Danielle Luchetti, Pierfancisco Favino, Fabio Luigi, Stefano Accorsi - too many to do justice. On the other hand we can't help feeling they should try harder with retrospectives than offering Roberto Rossellini, whose work never did stand close scrutiny, and some familiar sixties diva vehicles.

I caught Fausto Brizzi' Si Mi Vuoi Bene in Rome a couple of years back. It was a slick, sentimental comedy in the line of Bisio’s Benvenuti al sud/Nord.  Dissatisfied with his life, bald lead Claudio Bisio spots the storefront Chiacchitere run by Sergio Rubini no less, where people are playing chess and nibbling fresh biscuits. After a night’s consideration, he comes back with a wall chart showing how he plans to put right the lives of his family and friends (vision of characters divided by a gold lightning bolt) setting up his ex wife with store help Dino Abbrescia, claiming to be a fan of Marquez whose name he can’t pronounce, Claudio being the guide on a tourist bus that delivers a load of Japanese to the wife’s “Cera una tempo” book shop to push cameras in her face or taking his lively blonde daughter on a day scaling tree walkway - nice cut to them surrounded by bubbles on the bench where she sat with him as a child.

These plots go wrong of course. His tennis playing dad is set up on a center court where the one time champion has been told to make him look good but dad taunts the man. Turns out the champ is moonlighting with mum too. Bisio’s ladyfriend is outraged and joins him in the Rage Room where she gets so stuck into smashing things that Claudio has to press the red button to get the manager to take away the crowbar she is waving. The brother’s exhibition of his painting of National flags is a bust until (this is dumb) he whacks one over Bisio’s head and a visiting New York critic wants him to do it in an exhibition in the US. The wife gets to appreciate the extra business the Asians represent. 

Good Turin production and strong cast. A few nice gags like Bisio registering shock by flinging the cat he is stroking accross the room. The climax with Rubini is genuinely touching. Si mi vuoi bene is quite endearing and an attempt to break the comedy formulas even if it sometimes doesn’t work and is ultimately soft centred.

Antonio Albanese - no not hat one  - the Italian actor, has been the lead in films by Gianni Amelio (Intrepido 2013) and Pupi Avati (La seconda notte di nozze 2005). Woody Allen made him the traffic cop in To Rome With Love and he’s directed his own movies. We have to regard him as an extension of the line of Italian comedy stars that runs through Toto, Sordi, Tognazzi, Celantano & Verdone. Fausto Brizzi 's 1917 Come un gatto intangenziale/Like a Cat on the Highway with Albanese was his country’s biggest earner for its year, so we hoped to find why this lightweight has proved so popular  but it it never rose above good natured. 

Albanese appeared heading up a big league Rome Think Tank when his teenage daughter Alice Maselli hit him up for twenty Euros and introduced her boy friend from slummy Bastoggi. Things don’t get any better when Antonio follows her bus there and heads off the car from which dark roots and glitter-lettered singleted Paola Bergamasco emerges with a baseball bat to do his wind shield. Passing the “Abandon Hope All Ye who Enter here” wall graffiti he comes to the menacing block of flats where he nervously approaches the top  apartment with the pop music bell push summoning Bergamasco, the boy friend’s mother. 

The film trades on contrasting the two lifestyles.  They get their value out of this with her taken aback by the wall of painted nudes in his tasteful flat and a Bastoggi visit in the company of the daughter's nervous lavender growing mother. He goes on the beach outing to crowded Coccia di Morto (like the Coney Island scene in Devil and Miss Jones) and in return takes them trekking across the fields to the spacious society retreat with the gourmet buffet. We get the arrival of the boy’s slobby dad Luca Amendola with the foil & bleach hair who parts the beach crowd but gets taken away by the cops, or the compulsive shopping twin stepsisters who speak in unison, Alesandra & Guidesaa & Valentina Guidesaa, named Pamela and Sue Ellen after the characters in Dallas.

Off course Albanese's kiss rocks Paola's world and in the end he goes off script and tells his Think Tank that they don’t understand common people like the Coccia di Morto lot. 

That one was quite well made but it traded in the charm of the cast rather than clever gags or strong plotting.

Cast photo, Ritorno a Coccia di Morto

The follow up to Come un gatto in tangenziale - Ritorno a Coccia di Morto  is in this year’s event.  We now get get strident Cortellesi in the nick after the cops found the stolen loot that the twins hid in Paola's flat after their shoplifting outings. Fellow inmates in the domesticated cell tell her to call on “Il Ministro” her influential friend. He’s involved in group selection of the color scheme for the cultural museum he’s setting up but snaps  onto the job, having her transfered to a Catholic institution outside Rome where her nun supervisor keeps popping on organ notes and the aged priest in charge has been replaced by a younger more gung ho cleric expected back from retreat at any minute.

She finds her bed was previously occupied by the fierce looking mother superior who died in it at 103 - the day before. That one figures in Cortellesi’s black and white nightmares.

When the husband of the abused wife sheltered there starts shouting threats Paola headbuts him to the applause of the inmates and nuns. But Paola doesn't fit in all that well when her Milanese community kitchen speciality contains pork that the Muslim parishoners can't eat.

The Rev. Luca Argentero proves to be a better Communist than politician Albanese having tables cleared away after his service to set up the free meal kitchen for the poor. Antonio takes Paola on a cultural tour - the Prosepina statue, a view of the Vatican and their gumboot underground expedition which comes out behind the Trevi fountain. This is nice.

They get back, breaking Paola’s midnight curfew to find father Argentero more concerned with his squatters whose power has been cut off (to the delight of the neighbors). It’s Paola who knows how to rewire the broken connection without breaking the seal, which would be illegal. The cops think she's a passing transvestite looking at the murky security footage. That doesn't go down too well. 

Unfortunately her intervention shuts down all the lights of Rome and the ice sculpture in Antonio's Museum melts leaving a steel  fishbone shape and the floor awash. The comparison between the not unimpressive museum exhibits and the Public Space where they do games, ballet and movies is the smartest thing in this rather blunt satire. When Padre Argentero’s kitchens are condemned by the public health, Paola has him set up there solving that problem rather simplistically.

Back at Cortellesi’s flat the twins rented the rooms to Indian immigrants further impeding Albanese and Cortelesi’s romance. The pair plan on surprising the kids but they have a surprise of their own.

There's nice use of the width of the ‘scope screen. The film passes the time.

Luigi Lo Cascio (centre), Alba Rhrwacher (r), Lacci

It seems hard to believe that I’ve been on Daniele Luchetti’s case for more than thirty years - since I checked out an unknown film from Cannes at the Paris Cinémathèque, that turned out to be the unexpected, likeable Domani accadrà. 

Everything of his I’ve seen has proved to be complex and rewarding but for a lot of his new Lacci, it seemed that Luchetti’s work had plunged into gloom - infidelity, a suicide attempt, people bound together by ties that make them miserable and impact  their children - but if you wait it out the same distanced comic view of life does surface in an even more perverse form than we are used to, one that brings the rest of the film - and real life - into focus.

Alba Rohrwacher and Luigi Lo Casio (great cast in top form here) are raising a young family as he works as a Radio literature commentator in Rome, backed by sound effects men whose antics delight his children. They seem to be absolutely happy as the family join in a dance session and run through the streets in Halloween costume together. 

However out of the blue Lo Casio tells his wife of eight years he’s sleeping with another woman. She turns him out of the house - shot of him pausing downstairs by the car, which we will see again as a locating point in the film’s convoluted time structure.

Understandably he’s on with the delicious Linda Caridi, who his pre-teen daughter secretly adores. There’s a scene of him photographing her naked which proves to be one of the apparently irrelevant incidents that shape the narrative - naming the family cat, the trick unlocking mechanism for the gift box from Poland or the odd way he ties his lacci, shoelaces.

These eventually carry more weight than Rohrwacher’s leap from the second story window from which she’s thrown the radio broadcasting his program or his failure to either create a new family free of ties or sustain the old one.

Flash ahead twenty years and the characters have grown into Laura Morante and grey bearded Luchetti regular Silvio Orlandi who has perfected his serious comic persona. They bicker about his overpaying for Morante’s back massager and suspect the delivery girl of the break-in that las left the flat ransacked and its lifetime of  accumulation in chaos. Orlandi is particularly disturbed over the missing Polish box.

Unexpectedly we pick up with the grown children - and the cat - trying to figure out their lives. Grown daughter Giovanna Mezzogiorno vents. I’ve been on before about the frequency of  the word “vergogna” in Italian films and here we get a major film that pivots on it. It’s introduction into the final dialogues provides the weight to what we have already seen. Mezzogiorno dismisses her mother’s battle to achieve the thing she didn’t really want and her father’s life’s time archiving his insignificant work but the film’s tone is finally not bitter but one of ironic sympathy with characters unable to undo their mistakes, which their children inherit.

The performances dominate though they are showcased by Luchetti’s master craft and his non-judgmental world view. The film seems visually unremarkable but there is control to make the return to familiar images, the single shot of the wheel chair or the glimpses of Rome or Lazio register. Lacci is the director’s most complex and ambitious film, a snap back into his heavy hitter status, a more implacable version of his Anni felice, after the lightweight Momenti di Trascurabile Felicita.