Open Roads: New Italian Cinema
The Film Society of Lincoln Center, June 3 – 10, 2010

In a departure from previous editions of the mini-festival, several films this year would readily burst through language barriers if the marketplace were friendlier toward subtitled films. The five films below were much more story-driven, cross-over friendly than many of the insular homegrown productions I saw at the last Venice Film Festival (Tip O’Neill was right: politics really is local).

“Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve” is the mantra of two university students in Ten Winters, which fly by in no time. Their tentative romance, or, rather, one-upmanship, is a textbook case of bad timing, and thankfully without the overbearing quirk, the verbal masturbation, or a predictable indie soundtrack of its twentysomething American counterparts. The back-and-forth thrust and parry between Camilla and Silvestro is like Two for the Road in reverse, set in an overcast Venice devoid of tourists.

She’s timid, more cerebral; he’s a clown. Neither recognizes the right moment to admit the obvious. The audience knows immediately they’re made for each other. When they first meet on a vaporetto, they’re both schlepping odd and awkward baggage—she, a tall floor lamp taken from home (remember the life of a cash-strapped student?); he, a dangling tree sculpture. This quietly unassuming film won Valerio Mieli a Dontello, the Italian Oscar, for best debut director.

Another first-timer, Giuseppe Capatondi made a splashy debut in the Venice Film Festival competition with The Double Hour (as in the time 10:10 pm), a twisty pretzel-like psychological thriller. Within the first 10 minutes, a hotel maid, Sonia from Slovenia, witnesses the death of a guest and then, a month later, embarks on an uncomfortable evening of speed dating, facing the blunt and the sleazy, until she meets the terse Bruno, whose machismo exterior slowly thaws. Those two incongruous sequences are interconnected through the cleverly layered plot, which refrains from overwhelming the characters. Actress Ksenie Rappoport gives a very internalized and exceptional performance, but watch her actions. What you see may not really be what you think you’re witnessing. (She won best actress at Venice.) This tightly packed film has more ah-hah moments than the film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and certainly more than The Secret in Their Eyes.

Star Margherita Buy plays the skeptical main character of White Space, Maria, who would, no doubt, bristle at the drama’s description as a prickly art-house chick flick. It defiantly cures the Sex and the City 2 hangover. Maria fights against a Hollywood ending and wins. She’s first seen dancing by herself at a party, where almost everyone else is half her age. Blond, dressed in back, and in great shape, she fits in yet looks her age without the aid of a dermatologist.  

Maria’s a woman after my own heart. When an ex-boyfriend shows off a picture of his baby, she focuses not on the beautiful child but on a lamp in the background, and she’s the type of moviegoer who rightly shoots daggers at the parent who brings a crying baby. All of the fast-paced vignettes in the film’s beginning foreshadow her predicament: Maria unexpectantly becomes pregnant and then delivers a daughter three months prematurely. And then she begins waiting while her baby fights for her life in an incubator. White Space pointedly addresses Maria’s ambivalence toward motherhood. When does the maternal instinct kick in? Rest assured, the character’s not named Maria for nothing.

Cosmonauta challenges your idea of pre-Beatles teeny boppers—imagine Grease’s Olivia Newton-John worshipping at the altar of Marx and not John Travolta. (Hence the title, named for Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.) A combination of sensitive and selfish, headstrong Luciana embodies the contradictions of growing up, politically and hormonally. Her afterschool activities included plastering the suburban Roman streets with political posters and firebombing the local Social Democrats headquarters. She and her comrades live in a bubble, as if Khrushchev’s denunciation or the invasion of Hungry had never taken place. Luciana also never questions living in a doorman building (with her own bedroom) when her widowed mother remarries into the burgeoning middle class. Naturally, she views stepdad as a fascist.

Based on a World War II tragedy, The Man Who Will Come arrives having won the best film Donatello prize. However, the film never entirely dispels my skepticism of the use of fictitious characters to enact real-life events. The inevitable questions are left unanswered, and the subject matter is never examined as thoroughly as in a documentary—especially when the horrendous events are seen through the eyes of an Innocent Child. Co-writer/director Giorgio Diritti limits her role to an observer as much as he can by making her mute. Fortunately, child actress Greta Zuccheri Montanari underplays her role.

The intimate first hour, devoted to the impoverished, unhurried life of one extended farming family, is not unlike Emmano Olmi’s classic re-creation of early-20th-century rural life in The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (without the graphic butchering of a pig). Then the mood changes. Suspense derives from the family members hiding out from maundering Germans, indiscriminately out for blood in retaliation for the attacks from the partisans hiding in the woods. Unfortunately, many of the drawn-out scenes are clumsily filmed in a way where the audience is unsure where the characters are in relation to each other. And no matter how guilty you may feel, you can’t help wondering when the atrocities will begin. Diritti never exploits the ensuing violence, though. The camera tilts away as bullets fly, and most of the killings occur off screen. Far from sensational, the effect is much more muted, considering the bloodshed. He handles a Very Important Historical Matter sensitively and tastefully, not viscerally. Kent Turner
June 11, 2010