Gianni (writer/director Gianni di Gregorio) is a lovable man in his mid-60s who is besotted by women of all sorts. He deeply loves his daughter and wife, to say nothing about his 95-year old mother (Valeria de Franciscis) who he looks after. He's infatuated with every woman he seems and they seem to love him, but only in the way a daughter loves a father. He's an old guy and seems to have totally lost his sexual mojo. His downstairs neighbor, his mother's nurse, the daughter of his mom's best friend all seem to love the attention he gives to them (he's in love with all of them), but are not able to return the interest. At some point when his best friend tells him he should get a girlfriend to get his youthful juices flowing, he tries, but fails miserably.
This is a very nice, very simple follow up to di Gregorio's even simpler film from last year, Mid-August Lunch. Just as with that one, this film is not flashy and moves along with a clever story, great dialogue and a naturalness that is very refreshing. Di Gregorio's style is reminiscent of early Woody Allen stuff, but he's a bit more self-aware than Woody and not as gonzo or as much of a nebbish. This is what Woody's film should be like today - but instead, he makes his older male leads get the bombshells he pursues (in a ridiculous, gross way with Whatever Works).
Di Gregorio is old and wise enough to know that it is true that most women in their 20s and 30s don't look at men in their 60s in a sexual way, despite what many sextagenarians would have us believe. Instead he shows us an interesting thing about how the "male gaze" changes as men get older and become less threatening and visible to younger women. He gawks at these babes, but they don't look back at him or even realize he's looking at them because they don't see him as a sexual being. This becomes a pretty funny jokes as he stares at their boobs and butts without them knowing the difference. He would be much better off just just enjoying the wonderful Roman life he has with his wife and daughter.
This is a fun film, a bit more of a story than Mid-August Lunch, but similarly delightful.
Stars: 3 of 4
The Salt of Life will open the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2011 festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center at 6:30pm on June 1 and will play again at 9pm on June 4.
Italian etiketine sahip kayıtlar gösteriliyor. Tüm kayıtları göster
Italian etiketine sahip kayıtlar gösteriliyor. Tüm kayıtları göster
10 Mayıs 2011 Salı
3 Mayıs 2011 Salı
Le Quattro Volte (Tuesday, May 3, 2011) (27)
Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is a beautiful and challenging film. It has a light narrative structure, but feels more like an experimental art piece than anything particularly plot-driven. It relies entirely on the beautiful cinematography of Andrea Locatelli, employing no score and no dialogue. The sound we hear is created by the natural situations we witness: a truck driving up a hill, the bells of a herd of goats as well as their collective bleating, a crowd of people getting together in a village square for a celebration. This is a very slow-moving film, but is quite lyrical and interesting.
It opens with an old goat herder walking with his sheep in the hills in rural Italy. He has a terrible cough and stops his work to hack away for awhile. When he gets home, he mixes an unknown substance into a glass of water. The next day as he makes his rounds in the village delivering milk he picks up a pack of dust from the church after a nun has blessed it (this dust is what he drank in the water the night before). Later we follow a goat kid from its birth to its first trip out with the flock into the hills, where it gets separated from the group because it can't keep up. Finally we see the villagers cut a tall tree and put it up in the square for a celebration. The tree is taken down and burned to make charcoal.
These little episodes all deal with the cycle of life and relative life-spans for each kind of being (a man, an animal and a tree). It seems the title (The Four Times, in English) refers to a theory of Pythagoras that life has four stages from beginning to end: human, animal, plant and mineral. I have to admit, I caught the four parts, but it's still rather cryptic (and had to look up the meaning after I saw the film... I'm a cheater).
I was struck a few times over the course of the picture about how much it reminded me of some of the more exotic fare of Tarkovsky, notably his Solaris from 1972. Clearly that is a story mostly set in space, but it deals with ontology in an interesting, abstract way. This connection was particularly clear to me with the way Frammartino uses shots of natural textures to fill the screen expressively between more narrative moments. Even though it is stylistically very different from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi (there's no music, the shots don't have much movement in them at all), they both share a similar poetic quality.
This is not an easy film, but it is interesting and beautiful. It's not often a film can capture your attention for 88 minutes without nearly any sound. This one does.
Stars: 3 of 4
It opens with an old goat herder walking with his sheep in the hills in rural Italy. He has a terrible cough and stops his work to hack away for awhile. When he gets home, he mixes an unknown substance into a glass of water. The next day as he makes his rounds in the village delivering milk he picks up a pack of dust from the church after a nun has blessed it (this dust is what he drank in the water the night before). Later we follow a goat kid from its birth to its first trip out with the flock into the hills, where it gets separated from the group because it can't keep up. Finally we see the villagers cut a tall tree and put it up in the square for a celebration. The tree is taken down and burned to make charcoal.
These little episodes all deal with the cycle of life and relative life-spans for each kind of being (a man, an animal and a tree). It seems the title (The Four Times, in English) refers to a theory of Pythagoras that life has four stages from beginning to end: human, animal, plant and mineral. I have to admit, I caught the four parts, but it's still rather cryptic (and had to look up the meaning after I saw the film... I'm a cheater).
I was struck a few times over the course of the picture about how much it reminded me of some of the more exotic fare of Tarkovsky, notably his Solaris from 1972. Clearly that is a story mostly set in space, but it deals with ontology in an interesting, abstract way. This connection was particularly clear to me with the way Frammartino uses shots of natural textures to fill the screen expressively between more narrative moments. Even though it is stylistically very different from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi (there's no music, the shots don't have much movement in them at all), they both share a similar poetic quality.
This is not an easy film, but it is interesting and beautiful. It's not often a film can capture your attention for 88 minutes without nearly any sound. This one does.
Stars: 3 of 4
4 Nisan 2011 Pazartesi
The Double Hour (Monday, April 4, 2011) (23)
The Double Hour is a movie about... well, about doubles. Boom! The title comes from the moment when the hour on a digital clock match the minutes (10:10, say). At these times there is some magic in the air and there is a suggestion of an alternate world - a parallel world to ours (though not as elegant as the Double Life of Veronique).
In the film, Sonia (Kseniya Rappaport) is an Eastern European immigrant maid working in a hotel in Turin. One night she goes to a speed dating event and meets Guido (Fillippo Timi) a widower who is working through the pain in his life by dating (and fucking) as many women as he can. There is an instant connection between the two of them as they are both trying to escape their pasts and enjoy the romance and eroticism of the other's company.
One day, on a date to Guido's work as a surveillance security guard, they are caught up in robbery that goes wrong. It seems to us that Guido is killed and Sonia survives, but in this world of doubles, things aren't always what they seem.
Director Guiseppe Capotondi is anything but subtle with the double imagery and motifs. Guido's deceased wife looks just like Sonia (as does one of the women he's screwing at the beginning of the film), leading us to make constant double takes (get it?!) and question who we are seeing at any given moment. There are a lot of mirrors throughout (an easy thing to put on screen when Sonia's work involves cleaning bathrooms) and the screen if frequently split by masking devices (like in the poster). All of this style is clever, and overall this is a very good looking film, but it is totally overdone. It's impossible to watch the film and not notice every single double, which gets very tedious and really doesn't add up to much in the end.
This feels like a movie that has a slick script that looks great on paper and is nice and sleek looking on screen, but really doesn't mean very much once all is said and done. As an exercise in technique it's a lovely work, but it's emotionally rather hollow and has such a pedestrian twist it could just be a big budget Hollywood studio piece (though such a film probably wouldn't look so good).
My problem with Euro movies that feel like Hollywood garbage is that Euros don't really know how to make Hollywood garbage well. They put too much beauty in them (they're Euros after all). On the surface this seems like a nice movie, but if you dig just below the surface there's not that much there. I guess that's yet another "double'.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
In the film, Sonia (Kseniya Rappaport) is an Eastern European immigrant maid working in a hotel in Turin. One night she goes to a speed dating event and meets Guido (Fillippo Timi) a widower who is working through the pain in his life by dating (and fucking) as many women as he can. There is an instant connection between the two of them as they are both trying to escape their pasts and enjoy the romance and eroticism of the other's company.
One day, on a date to Guido's work as a surveillance security guard, they are caught up in robbery that goes wrong. It seems to us that Guido is killed and Sonia survives, but in this world of doubles, things aren't always what they seem.
Director Guiseppe Capotondi is anything but subtle with the double imagery and motifs. Guido's deceased wife looks just like Sonia (as does one of the women he's screwing at the beginning of the film), leading us to make constant double takes (get it?!) and question who we are seeing at any given moment. There are a lot of mirrors throughout (an easy thing to put on screen when Sonia's work involves cleaning bathrooms) and the screen if frequently split by masking devices (like in the poster). All of this style is clever, and overall this is a very good looking film, but it is totally overdone. It's impossible to watch the film and not notice every single double, which gets very tedious and really doesn't add up to much in the end.
This feels like a movie that has a slick script that looks great on paper and is nice and sleek looking on screen, but really doesn't mean very much once all is said and done. As an exercise in technique it's a lovely work, but it's emotionally rather hollow and has such a pedestrian twist it could just be a big budget Hollywood studio piece (though such a film probably wouldn't look so good).
My problem with Euro movies that feel like Hollywood garbage is that Euros don't really know how to make Hollywood garbage well. They put too much beauty in them (they're Euros after all). On the surface this seems like a nice movie, but if you dig just below the surface there's not that much there. I guess that's yet another "double'.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
15 Mart 2011 Salı
Certified Copy (Tuesday, March 15, 2011) (15)
Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is a very unusual film, despite seeming like a very natural one on the surface. It begins with an English man, James (Richard Shimmel), giving a lecture in Italy on his new book about the history and value of art fakes. As he speaks, a woman, Ellie (Juliette Binoche), stumbles into the room with her teenage son in tow. At the end of the talk she asks him to sign several copies of the book for her so she can give them to family and friends. She's an antiques dealer, and a Frenchwoman, and is aware of the value and market for fakes in her line of work. The two agree to meet the following day.
When the meet the next day they agree to get in the car and take a drive to no particular place - just go. Over the course of the day together we see that they are not actually strangers, but are a married couple rather at the end of their relationship rope (well, maybe... it's rather unclear). It seems they've been married for 15 years, live apart much of the time and fight often.
For the rest of the movie the two work over a fight they recently had and discuss who was wrong and when. The audience then has to go backwards and figure out what the game was they were playing at the beginning where they seemed to not know one another.
I have to admit that this really doesn't feel to me like a typical Kiarostami film, because it's very heavy on dialogue and very light on visual style and beauty - most of it is shot inside with cuts back and forth as a couple are talking - but it's a really interesting one (and is beautiful as anything that comes out of Kiarostami's brain would be). I think it's a clever trick from a writing point of view that the film we watch in the first act is very different from the one in the second two acts. Midway through the picture, the story changes dramatically.
I'm fascinated by the idea that this couple has a strained relationship, which manifests itself by them pretending to be strangers with one another, even when there are no witnesses around. I can't stop wondering though if they are actually somehow a pair of strangers who are playing that they are married rather than the inverse (which would help to explain problematic characters like the son who also seems to know know James). Perhaps everything up to the point of the revelation that they're married (in a cafe about two-thirds of the way through) is real and what follows is the farce.
In any event, I'm interested in the idea of copies and the deconstructed and formalist elements of the film as a copy for real life. The characters here are living their lives, but jump into a copy-life where they don't know one another (or they don't know one another and then go into a copy-life where they do). They go to a town where they were apparently married, almost a copy of their wedding day/night. They speak to each other in French or English, meaning two different things (she'll speak to him in French and he'll reply in English). Where is the reality? Where is the ground? It's really interesting.
This is a very interesting and mysterious film. Kiarostami could be saying that we are never who we really are in a relationship (even a casual flirtatious one) or that people can never be trusted, but considering nobody can be trusted, we can all agree on the relative value and importance of the relationships that are based on lies - just like how copies of great works of art have value as art themselves. It is a very post-modern concept and I appreciate that it's presented in such a standard format. Just as with a great copy, at first glance this does not seem to be such an interesting ontological examination - but it's only when you dig a bit deeper that the real nature of the piece comes out.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
When the meet the next day they agree to get in the car and take a drive to no particular place - just go. Over the course of the day together we see that they are not actually strangers, but are a married couple rather at the end of their relationship rope (well, maybe... it's rather unclear). It seems they've been married for 15 years, live apart much of the time and fight often.
For the rest of the movie the two work over a fight they recently had and discuss who was wrong and when. The audience then has to go backwards and figure out what the game was they were playing at the beginning where they seemed to not know one another.
I have to admit that this really doesn't feel to me like a typical Kiarostami film, because it's very heavy on dialogue and very light on visual style and beauty - most of it is shot inside with cuts back and forth as a couple are talking - but it's a really interesting one (and is beautiful as anything that comes out of Kiarostami's brain would be). I think it's a clever trick from a writing point of view that the film we watch in the first act is very different from the one in the second two acts. Midway through the picture, the story changes dramatically.
I'm fascinated by the idea that this couple has a strained relationship, which manifests itself by them pretending to be strangers with one another, even when there are no witnesses around. I can't stop wondering though if they are actually somehow a pair of strangers who are playing that they are married rather than the inverse (which would help to explain problematic characters like the son who also seems to know know James). Perhaps everything up to the point of the revelation that they're married (in a cafe about two-thirds of the way through) is real and what follows is the farce.
In any event, I'm interested in the idea of copies and the deconstructed and formalist elements of the film as a copy for real life. The characters here are living their lives, but jump into a copy-life where they don't know one another (or they don't know one another and then go into a copy-life where they do). They go to a town where they were apparently married, almost a copy of their wedding day/night. They speak to each other in French or English, meaning two different things (she'll speak to him in French and he'll reply in English). Where is the reality? Where is the ground? It's really interesting.
This is a very interesting and mysterious film. Kiarostami could be saying that we are never who we really are in a relationship (even a casual flirtatious one) or that people can never be trusted, but considering nobody can be trusted, we can all agree on the relative value and importance of the relationships that are based on lies - just like how copies of great works of art have value as art themselves. It is a very post-modern concept and I appreciate that it's presented in such a standard format. Just as with a great copy, at first glance this does not seem to be such an interesting ontological examination - but it's only when you dig a bit deeper that the real nature of the piece comes out.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
23 Ekim 2010 Cumartesi
Videocracy (Sunday, October 24, 2010) (140)
Videocracy is an Italian documentary about how Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls his country and his power through the garbage he puts on television and the greater media that surrounds his terrible reality shows. It is pure political polemic of the most bitter and cutting variety. It doesn't really work totally as an effective documentary (or polemic), but there are some amazing moments in it.
We see some of the history of Berlusconi's reality shows and how he came to power. We see how he made Italian women want to be "velinas" or TV game show models - like Vanna White, but more mindless and with less clothes. We then see how he keeps his friends in the entertainment industry close, like Lele Mora, a super-agent for TV stars - especially those who want to go from Big Brother to music recording. Finally we see Fabrizio Corona, a major Italian paparazzo and how Mora and Corona and the television stations keep the gossip and celebrity nonsense swirling in the atmosphere, ultimately helping to keep Berlusconi popular with the people.
In many ways, this is a bit of a glimpse at what America could be in 50 years. Politics is basically taken over by demagoguery and the only entertainment is absolute garbage gossip. People are generally unhappy, but they don't really fight it because their minds are so numbed by the situation.
Director Erik Gandini clearly has a beef with Berlusconi and basically calls him a criminal and a murderer several times through the film. He uses a voice over narrator who sounds like he's spitting acid when he says the prime minister's name. I think some of this political hatred should have been modified as what we get is much less effective with it in there.
This is a fun movie if you are interested in Italy (and don't like Silvio Berlusconi), but it is not one that is incredibly important. It's basically a very good 60 Minutes story - or really, three stories - but with a lot more animosity.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
10 Ekim 2010 Pazar
Mid-August Lunch (Sunday, October 10, 2010) (134)
Mid-August Lunch takes place around the Italian holiday of Ferragosto, which is the equivalent of Labor Day. In the film, Gianni is a guy in his 60s who lives with his mother (a not-uncommon thing to find in Italy, apparently). On the weekend before the holiday, a neighbor in his apartment building comes to him to ask if he would look after the guy's elderly mother for the weekend, and in return that he would waive some of the money Gianni owes the building. Seeing this as a wise economic trade-off, Gianni agrees.
The next day the neighbor comes with his mother and an aunt. Now Gianni has three old women to take care of. A bit later in the day, he sees a doctor friend of his for a check-up. The doctor tells him he has to go out of town for the night and asks if Gianni could look after his mother too. Figuring one more woman won't be a problem, he agrees to this too. Now he has to look after four elderly women on one of the hottest days of the year in a rather small apartment.
This is not a particularly brilliant film, but it is really fun, wonderful and sweet. I really liked the lead actor, Gianni Di Gregorio, who also wrote and directed this (and also wrote Gomorrah from last year). He's a very normal guy who reacts to this situation in a very natural way.
I appreciate the smallness of the film and that it's a very tight story without any fancy tricks or elaborate set-ups. This is effectively a short-story turned into a movie. Di Gregorio wonderfully uses a hand-held camera throughout the film putting us right in the middle of the action with the crazy women and him in the tight quarters of the modest apartment. This is a small touch, but it's very important and smart. This totally adds tons to the intimacy of the story and dramatically helps our experience here.
Again, there is nothing here that is particularly deep, but it is very nice and enjoyable.
Stars: 3 of 4
The next day the neighbor comes with his mother and an aunt. Now Gianni has three old women to take care of. A bit later in the day, he sees a doctor friend of his for a check-up. The doctor tells him he has to go out of town for the night and asks if Gianni could look after his mother too. Figuring one more woman won't be a problem, he agrees to this too. Now he has to look after four elderly women on one of the hottest days of the year in a rather small apartment.
This is not a particularly brilliant film, but it is really fun, wonderful and sweet. I really liked the lead actor, Gianni Di Gregorio, who also wrote and directed this (and also wrote Gomorrah from last year). He's a very normal guy who reacts to this situation in a very natural way.
I appreciate the smallness of the film and that it's a very tight story without any fancy tricks or elaborate set-ups. This is effectively a short-story turned into a movie. Di Gregorio wonderfully uses a hand-held camera throughout the film putting us right in the middle of the action with the crazy women and him in the tight quarters of the modest apartment. This is a small touch, but it's very important and smart. This totally adds tons to the intimacy of the story and dramatically helps our experience here.
Again, there is nothing here that is particularly deep, but it is very nice and enjoyable.
Stars: 3 of 4
4 Temmuz 2010 Pazar
I Am Love (Sunday, July 4, 2010) (64)
I Am Love is a technical work of beauty, but rather pedestrian as a narrative. Writer/director Luca Guadagnino does a beautiful job creating a sumptuous world, filling it with joys for all the senses.
The trite story revolves around a super rich family in Milan who have one of the biggest homes I have ever seen in my life or onscreen. It is a marvel of Art Deco decoration with 30-foot ceilings throughout. The wife, Emma (played by Tilda Swinton) is a bit bored with her life, though and looking for distractions. Her son is about to take over the family business and her daughter has moved to London for an art school and has come out as a lesbian. One day she meets a close friend of her son who is a chef. Between his delicious food and his beautiful Italian youth, she falls in love with him, and he falls in love with her. They begin an affair that could ruin her marriage and her family.
To begin with, the score, by master minimalist composer John Adams is absolutely transcendent and fabulous. From the opening titles, this puts you in a super modern setting. It is unquestionably Adams and also fits in beautifully in the lusciousness of contemporary Milan. For his first film score, Adams does an amazing job.
Then Guadagnino gives us shot after shot after shot of absolutely delicious food. Like other great food movies (Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Big Night) this makes our mouths water and is so vivid that we think we can smell the steam as it wafts above the plates. It's best not to see this on an empty stomach.
All of the sets are magnificent and perfectly Art Deco, like the house. Because of the size of the rooms, the furniture is all oversized giving the sense of extreme comfort, but also jarring perspective (will I get lost in the enormous sofa?). The last shot of the film is of the massive golden carpet that covers the entry atrium of the house. This massive yellow field fills up the screen and is both powerful and dramatic - even though it is monochrome. Of course, being in Milan, the costumes are totally fabulous as well. This is an extremely wealthy family and they dress immaculately.
Overall the rather dull story is masked by a beautiful operatic style. I guess the melodrama fits in well with such a format, but it does get a bit tedious - as the woman's choices are to leave the amazingly privileged and loving environment of her family and home for a poor chef she has a crush on, or to go off with him and maybe find another happy life. It's a bit of an unbalanced choice, I think, and a bit of an overdone, over-romantic look at the world (in a million years this woman would never make such a choice - only in an opera).
Swinton is very good as a Russian/Italian mother (she moved from Moscow at some point in the past and became Italian the moment she got off the plane, she says). She's warm, elegant and loving, if a bit self-concerned and short-sighted. Her son, played by Flavio Parenti is also very good. He is proud and traditional and wants to make his parents happy. He's a bit of a dreamer, and, I think, has massive oedipal issues that come out very realistically.
If we can separate what we see and experience here from the story itself, this is be an easy one to break down. It gets top points for everything technical (score, production design, costumes), but very low points for the script. Overall it's a beautiful movie and one that really does excite all of our senses (including taste, smell and touch - a very hard thing to achieve on film). It's just a lousy story vehicle to get to that stage.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
The trite story revolves around a super rich family in Milan who have one of the biggest homes I have ever seen in my life or onscreen. It is a marvel of Art Deco decoration with 30-foot ceilings throughout. The wife, Emma (played by Tilda Swinton) is a bit bored with her life, though and looking for distractions. Her son is about to take over the family business and her daughter has moved to London for an art school and has come out as a lesbian. One day she meets a close friend of her son who is a chef. Between his delicious food and his beautiful Italian youth, she falls in love with him, and he falls in love with her. They begin an affair that could ruin her marriage and her family.
To begin with, the score, by master minimalist composer John Adams is absolutely transcendent and fabulous. From the opening titles, this puts you in a super modern setting. It is unquestionably Adams and also fits in beautifully in the lusciousness of contemporary Milan. For his first film score, Adams does an amazing job.
Then Guadagnino gives us shot after shot after shot of absolutely delicious food. Like other great food movies (Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Big Night) this makes our mouths water and is so vivid that we think we can smell the steam as it wafts above the plates. It's best not to see this on an empty stomach.
All of the sets are magnificent and perfectly Art Deco, like the house. Because of the size of the rooms, the furniture is all oversized giving the sense of extreme comfort, but also jarring perspective (will I get lost in the enormous sofa?). The last shot of the film is of the massive golden carpet that covers the entry atrium of the house. This massive yellow field fills up the screen and is both powerful and dramatic - even though it is monochrome. Of course, being in Milan, the costumes are totally fabulous as well. This is an extremely wealthy family and they dress immaculately.
Overall the rather dull story is masked by a beautiful operatic style. I guess the melodrama fits in well with such a format, but it does get a bit tedious - as the woman's choices are to leave the amazingly privileged and loving environment of her family and home for a poor chef she has a crush on, or to go off with him and maybe find another happy life. It's a bit of an unbalanced choice, I think, and a bit of an overdone, over-romantic look at the world (in a million years this woman would never make such a choice - only in an opera).
Swinton is very good as a Russian/Italian mother (she moved from Moscow at some point in the past and became Italian the moment she got off the plane, she says). She's warm, elegant and loving, if a bit self-concerned and short-sighted. Her son, played by Flavio Parenti is also very good. He is proud and traditional and wants to make his parents happy. He's a bit of a dreamer, and, I think, has massive oedipal issues that come out very realistically.
If we can separate what we see and experience here from the story itself, this is be an easy one to break down. It gets top points for everything technical (score, production design, costumes), but very low points for the script. Overall it's a beautiful movie and one that really does excite all of our senses (including taste, smell and touch - a very hard thing to achieve on film). It's just a lousy story vehicle to get to that stage.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
3 Nisan 2010 Cumartesi
Vincere (Saturday, April 3, 2010) (27)
Vincere tells the story of Benito Mussolini and his relationship with an early mistress and their bastard son. It shows him rising from the Left as a demagogue journalist and then switching to the Right and gaining power. Along the way, he meets Ida Dalser, a young political radical, and the two fall madly in love with one another. The only problem was that Mussolini already has a wife and kids. As he rises up the power structure in Italy to become "Il Duce", Ida gets pregnant and has a son. He initially acknowledges the boy is his, but then turns around and locks her up in an insane asylum, claiming she's crazy to be speaking of their relationship.
Clearly the historical tale here is fascinating - and something that I did not know about before. Mussolini is known to have been a power-hungry moron, not unlike George W. Bush or Andrew Jackson. He was able to rule with an iron fist... but sometimes that fist would change its mind and contradict itself. I'm not totally sure that that part of his personality really came out in this film. (Imagine a film about W. where he was portrayed as a fearless, genius leader who had a direction and a goal - this would be super frustrating, no?).
The story itself, as a tragic, romantic tale is particularly operatic. A young 'prince' falls in love with a woman, while he is married, as he takes over the kingdom, he has to shed his past and scorns his lover and son. Once he becomes the king, he can erase both of them entirely. But the story is not the problem as much as the structure of the script. After about the middle of the second act, Mussolini becomes a phantom character. At first he's in every scene of the film, but then it turns to focus only on Ida and he, as Il Duce, is somewhere else off screen. This was particularly frustrating to me.
Director Marco Bellocchio does a lovely job using Russian Avante Garde techniques of stylized titles over plastic footage to transition from one segment to another. But all this style doesn't totally work in this film. Yes, much of the action is happening in the 1920s, when Russian filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein were making their masterpieces Man with the Movie Camera, Strike and Battleship Potemkin, but it feels rather out of context. (Like if there was a film set in Sweden in the 1950s and Jackson Pollock influenced the visual style). It looks really good, but I think it doesn't really add up to much of any significance.
The acting is nice, especially Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida, but the whole film never comes together all that well. I never totally understand why I should care about any of the characters. I certainly never feel much pity for Ida or any compassion for Mussolini (I think it's hard to feel much of anything for a demagogue- you either follow them or yo don't). I appreciate the effort here, but I don't particularly love it.
Stars: 2 of 4
Clearly the historical tale here is fascinating - and something that I did not know about before. Mussolini is known to have been a power-hungry moron, not unlike George W. Bush or Andrew Jackson. He was able to rule with an iron fist... but sometimes that fist would change its mind and contradict itself. I'm not totally sure that that part of his personality really came out in this film. (Imagine a film about W. where he was portrayed as a fearless, genius leader who had a direction and a goal - this would be super frustrating, no?).
The story itself, as a tragic, romantic tale is particularly operatic. A young 'prince' falls in love with a woman, while he is married, as he takes over the kingdom, he has to shed his past and scorns his lover and son. Once he becomes the king, he can erase both of them entirely. But the story is not the problem as much as the structure of the script. After about the middle of the second act, Mussolini becomes a phantom character. At first he's in every scene of the film, but then it turns to focus only on Ida and he, as Il Duce, is somewhere else off screen. This was particularly frustrating to me.
Director Marco Bellocchio does a lovely job using Russian Avante Garde techniques of stylized titles over plastic footage to transition from one segment to another. But all this style doesn't totally work in this film. Yes, much of the action is happening in the 1920s, when Russian filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein were making their masterpieces Man with the Movie Camera, Strike and Battleship Potemkin, but it feels rather out of context. (Like if there was a film set in Sweden in the 1950s and Jackson Pollock influenced the visual style). It looks really good, but I think it doesn't really add up to much of any significance.
The acting is nice, especially Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida, but the whole film never comes together all that well. I never totally understand why I should care about any of the characters. I certainly never feel much pity for Ida or any compassion for Mussolini (I think it's hard to feel much of anything for a demagogue- you either follow them or yo don't). I appreciate the effort here, but I don't particularly love it.
Stars: 2 of 4
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