Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2025
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2025 (May 29- June 5, 2025): REVIEWS
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The time it takes/il tempo che ci vuo
FRANCESCA COMENCINI: THE TIME IT TAKES/IL TEMPO CHE CI VUOLE (2024) Opening Night Film
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FABRIZIO GIFONI, ROMANA MAGGIORA VERGANO IN THE TIME IT TAKES
Surviving the "anni di piombo" to become a director, like her famous father
Francesca Comencini is one of four daughters of mainstream "commedia all'italiana" filmmaker Luigi Comencini, considered to be one of the masters of classic Italian film comedy along with with Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Mario Monicelli.
That was the last sentence of my review of the only other Francesca Comencini film I have seen, In the Factory, (2007), from the 2008 Open Roads Italian film series at Lincoln Center. The Time It Takes is another, very different film. It was the opening night film seventeen years later for the 2025's Open Roads series. The auditorium was full, the audience was enthusiastic. The male star, Fabrizio Gifoni, talking at the Q&A with programmer Dan Sullivan, was enthusiastic and eloquent about the film. He said he had adored it from reading the screenplay through every step of the process.
While the 2007 film was an interesting, but somewhat canned and secondhand, documentry about Italian factories - some audience members thought it was a sellout to FIAT, in the new film Francesca Comencini is working very much for herself, though the film is certainly also a somewhat oddball tribute to her father. It's a tributer to his intense loyalty to his daughter, and his eventual influence on her career development. It never mentions that Luigi Comencini made some of the signaure movies of Italian "neorealismo rosa,"or pink neorealism, and directed many of the major Italian film actors of his day, including the great Alberto Sordi in two famous films and Vittorio De Sica e Gina Lollobrigida in the memorbly named 1954 Pane, Amore e Fantasia in the grand era of Italian postwar recovery and cultural triumph. Francesca Comencini's new film is intensely personal and highly emotional. It is also spare and elegant work, whose mise-en-scčne is as memorable as its fine performances by Fabrizio Gifoni and Romana Maggiora Vergano.
The spareness and elegance and emotional intensity, make a strong impression. This a powerful, self-consciously artistic personal portrait, perhas likely to ran one of the director's finest films (it is her fourteenth). But its elimination of detail is also problematic, which I'll say more about later.
We see the spareness in the interiors. Though Gifoni reported that the director rented the former Comencini Rome family residence to film there, the set decoaration has an abstract quality. The bedroom of the little girl version of the daughter, "Francisca," played by Anna Mangiocavallo, is as empty as a Moscow stage set with little other than a bed in it. And indeed the whole film is often like a theatical play, beginning with the focus on only two actors, Gifoni, as "Luigi," first with little Mangiacavallo, then with Romana Maggiora Vergano.
With these spare sets Francesca Comencini achieves an expressionistic effect, creating an unusually intense, collaborative relationship between film director father and the timid littlegirl, theh confused and troubled young woman, later successful filmmaker in her own right. Memorably, the father goes out of his way to intercede for the little girl when she tells him she is being bullied and mocked at her bilingual French school, not only by students but by the teacher. His dramatic intervention in the classroom (and in French) is memorable. Many good sequences follow but this one establishes the idea of a close collaboration that continues through youg adulthood.
Next little Francesca is always on set when Luigi is filming his Pinocchio TV series, which he is known for. In one scene she can't seem to get out of the "campo," the shot. And yet this disruption seems like a kind of collaboration. This was in 1972.
With the full-on "Anni di piombo" of the mid-seventies Francesca is grown up. There is an intense encounter where Luigi repeatedly interrogates Francesca: "Tu ti droghi?" (Are you doing drugs), where she keeps saying no, but later she collapses in the (memorably looming and spare) bathroom, and he screams at her over and over "Mi hai mentito" (You lied to me), and she eventally confesses over and oveer how ashamed she is.
Again, these sequences are like a stage play, and the convulsive troubles the young woman is going through lead into a reference by her father, for reassurance, to Beckett's lines "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." By this the father expresses his complicity - he says he too has oftenhad a sense of failure - along with the consoling belief that one can survive and triumph even in the face of such feelings.
During the worst of the Anni di piombo we see a classroom disrupted when a car-transported louspeaker in the street announces, to the students' applause, the Brigate Rosse kidnapping of President Aldo Moro (who later was killed by the kidnappers). Everything seems shut down, and in his grief and trauma after that, Luigi cannot make films. He seeks refuge in Paris, taking Francesca with him. "What will we do?" she asks. "We'll go to the cinema," he replies. In the aftermath of the drug revelation, he won't let her out of his sight, so the intimacy continues.
Later, Francesca starts making films. She is no longer in the care of her father and some of the sense of complicity has gone. But they have a conversation about filmmaking, and he gives his views. His aim was always to be popular, and he is shsocked that her first film is all about herself. He has never made a film about himself. He recognizes that she is trying to do something artistic. And low and behold, we see her walking toward camera with what looks like a Cannes Palm in her hands. (She has won a number of festival prizes, and a film was in Un Certain Regard at Cannes.)
The film ends with a passage of magic realism or fantsy: Luigi and Francesca flying throught the air with joined hands, till she symbolically lets him go, into the world beyond.
All this makes for a very distinctive film that is very sure of itself and very strong in its emotional picture of daughter and famous father. The trouble with it is that it isn't real. The filmmakng sequences of Pinocchio are quite elaborate, with plenty of extras and full-on recreation of the set, and there are scenes in the street during the political disturbances. There are classrooms full of students, with teachers. But we know how elaboratly scenes are staged in Fellini's films that remain in the realm of dream.
But these aren't dreams; they are more like a trance state in which Francesca obliterates anything other than herself and her father, the way she wants to remember him, and the turbulent years of her youth. Nothing is shown about other relationships, or the fact that Francesca had three sisters, one of whom, Cristina Comencini, is also a filmmaker. Does one get at the essential truth by eliminating many facts of one's life? This is an elegant film and for many an emotionally valid one. But that pared-down quality feels artificial. One thinks of Joanna Hogg's 2019 The Souvenir . It's also an autobiographical film about a young woman who becomes a director, which incidentally uses painstaking recreations of actual places where she lived, and the very problematic young man in her life then. Joanna Hogg however, apart from keeping her parents at more of a remove, doesn't seem to be erasing the surrounding details. It's an interesting comparison.
The Time It Takes/Il tempo che ci vuole, 110 mins., premiered at Venice Se[t. 6, 2024, where Romana Maggiora Vergano won the best actress prize; showing also at other festivals includng Chicago, Tallin Black Nights, Göteborg, and Rotterdam. It was screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads Italian film series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025), where it was the Opening Night film (May 29). Showtimes:
Thursday, May 29 at 7:00pm – Q&A with Fabrizio Gifuni
Tuesday, June 3 at 4:00pm
DIAMONDS/DIAMANTI (Ferzan Özpetek 2024)
FERZAN ÖZPETEK: DIAMONDS/DIAMANTI (2024)
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Review by Paolo Innicenti
Glory and drama of a vintage Italian movie costumer
The ambitious, glamorous new Italian film Diamanti begins with a sequence packed with actresses, eighteen of them, whom the director has previously directed in previous films. It's a luncheon party staged to introduce to them, somewhat artificially perhaps (wouldn't they already know?), the project of a new historical film, set in the eighteenth century, in which they will all perform. Most importantly, since it's the the main focus here, costumes will be made for these actresses that will be spectacular. This is a film about the art and industry of turning out movie costumes, focused on a historical Academy Award winning studio, Sartoria Canova, that produced them for the Italian film world.
So the film quickly moves from that somewhat chaotic gathering to the very focused and high-pressure world of costume-making.
On the Italian online film site My Movies a viewer says "Diamanti di Özpetek č il classico esempio di un film che vuole dire tutto ma finisce per non dire niente": Özpetek's Diamonds is a classic example of a film that wants to say everything and winds up saying nothing." This is unkind, and the film has been a successful crowd-pleaser in Italy (note the Davide Audience Award), but Diamonds is not a film likely to please those with an aversion to the glitzy, or the busy. It has a lot of stories to tell, not all of which can be considered integral to the plot, though in a sense, there is no plot anyway. Which stories will we remember? Aside from the bitchy boss-ladies, I'll remember Nicoletta (Milena Mancini), the cruelly abused seamstress, who's who can't hide her trauma at work. It's a terrifying tale, which drags the movie into a very ugly place, but may appeal to a country that is finally acknowledging its spousal abuse problem. On the other hand, everybody likes Silvana , the laid-back, bosomy cook, and Mara Venier, who plays her. She examplifies what they mean in Italian by "simpatica."
Özpetek is a prolific director generally admired in today's Italian cinema. Paolo Innocenti, the Youtube reviewer, provided a warm review, enthusiastically listing the many famous Italian actresses involved here, as well as Stefano Accorsi, who plays the director, while Özpetek comes in to play himself making this movie. But Innocenti makes clear that this isn't a film that can further flesh out the director's status as "the Italian Almodovar," because it lacks the passion, sexuality, and homosexuality of his films and is a movie about the making of movies and really not that either but only particularly that special branch of the craft of costuming. (Actually there is a short sequence of the most blatant beefcake that is, if not about gayness, pretty gay.)
Luisa Ranieri and Jasmine Trinca star as Alberta and Gabriella, two sisters who preside over the Roman fashion house of Canova during the 1970's. They are abusive, crazy-making prima donnas, dominant types for sure, but there are plenty of other personalities, and there is a big job to do to make all these fancy costumes (do we see enough of them, though?) for the movie in under two weeks. The way in which each character is given her little moment of personal emotion - the lover reappeared after fifteen years, the husband who's terribly abusive on the pretixt of a "bad" risotto, the child who has to hide because there's no babysitter, and so on, may be seen as engaging, on the on hand, or pat and trite, on the other. And always a bit distracting, a bit in too many directions. Yet we must admit that Italian cinema knows how to deliver corn in the most delicious way. This is a good risotto. But it's got an awful lot of flavors.
This is a film that's divisive, and while many love those flavors, others find this whole wedding cake of movie and drama celebration indigestible and lacking the kind of solid drama Özpetek has proven himself so good at providing. The score seems conventional and obtrusive at times, but the crafts are impeccable. And the dedication to women, and women in film, is sincere, as signaled by the concluding homage to three great ladies of Italian cinema, Mariangela Melato, Virna Lisi, and Monica Vitti. At Lincoln Center a magnificant tribute series is coming shortly, June 6-19, 2025, entitled La Modernista , to celebrate Monica Vitta's remarkable career, which ranges from the funniest to the most solemn and serious films of the great Italian cinematic postwar era. That will be wonderful, but it will be a reminder that we're not there now.
Diamonds/Diamanti, 135 mins., opened theatrically in Italy Dec. 19, 2024. Winner of the audience award at the 2025 Donatello Awards. Screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads Italian series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025). Showtimes:
Thursday, May 29 at 3:30pm – Q&A with Ferzan Özpetek
Tuesday, June 3 at 6:30pm
THE GREAT AMBITION /BERLINGUER. LA GRANDE AMBITIZIONE (Andrea Segre 2024)
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ELIO GERMANO IN THE GREAT AMBITION[/I]
ANDREA SEGRE: THE GREAT AMBITION/LA GRANDE AMBIZIONE (2024)
Biopic of Italy's popular communist leader Enrico Berlinguer
The excellent Elio Germano, winner of the best actor prize at the 2020 Berlinale for Hidden Away and at Cannes in 2010 for Our Life, is a decent likeness of Enrico Berlinguer, a man of breathtaking rectitude and the longtime leader of the Italian communist party (PCI). He was its secretary-general during the period of its ascendency from 1972 to 1984. This is the focus of Andrea Segre's compelling, if rather earnest, film The Great Ambition/La grande ambizione. Berlinger was a small, wiry man, and Germano looks like that here, though he looked taller and more rangy opposite the handsome Ricardo Scarmarcio in his star-making early film, the 2007My Brother Was an Only Child (which also was about a communist familly). The time depicted here was one of achievement for the PCI, but also of aspiration and disappointment, particlarly at the end when the 1978 kidnapping and murder of prime minister Aldo Moro dashed hopes of a powerful union of the PCI and the leading Christian Democrats.
The new film, itself a work of considerable ambition, was directed by Andrea Segre, who has made documentaries as well as feature films, and The Great Ambition freely uses historical footage, especially to depict public events, including large gatherings and street violence. Documentary and reconstructed material are skillfully interwoven in what is a continually engaging film. If there is any shortcoming here, there is a lack of personal drama, family conflict or family passion, for instance. But Berlinguer appears to have been a man in whom public and private were passionately interwoven. This film is like a pocket course in modern Italian political history, and it's an inspiring and engaging one, though not one for the faint hearted or those without an interest in learning about the subject.
This is the story of the rise and fall of a dream. It was a time when the PCI was largest communist party in Western Europe rising in the 1970s, to a third of the country's voters and close to two millian members. It was the second largest party in Italy and the largest non-ruling communist party in Europe. Interestingly, the film never speaks of the party as representing "the working class" but "the popular masses," which reminded me of Gamal Abdel Nasser's famous resignation speech in 1967 when he dranatucakkt declared, "I shall return to the ranks of the masses."
As is pointed out by Chaia Spagnoli Gabardi in her review, Enrico Berlinguer’s ideology was previously depicted in the 1977 Roberto Benigni comedy Berlinguer I love You/Berlinguer ti voglio bene, and he briefly appears in Marco Bellocchio’s series Esterno Notte, but comes across there as unpleasant, something that filmmaker Andrea Segre fixes in his film. Here I'd like to put in a plug for Bellocchio's stunning 2003 film about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro Buongiorno, notte, outstanding for depicting events from the POV of a conflicted female member of the Red Brigades kidnapping band. That is a great film (and a trim 106 minutes) where this is a highly competent one (and 123 minutes).
This is a great role for Germano but it is a political role, not a personal one. Moments with his family are present but not highlighted. He is shown by himself as an emissary of the PCi in Bulgaria at the outset, where he narrowly survives an assassination attempt, and he is most notably seen addressing a vast audience out of doors. Germano really delivers those speeches. They are what you come away from the film, along with his meetings with other party leaders where the future possibilities of grand alliances are discussed a.
The counter force to all this of course was capitalism. The seventies werer coming off Italy's postwar and after economic miracle and we see up close the FIAT multi-milllionaire Gianni Agnelli in an actual address, a grand spokesman for private wealth, since he was the richest man in Italy and was a glamorous and chisrismatic figure. But at the same time Gerlinguer was on the front pages of all the newspapers and magazines of Europe and on the cover of Time magazine.
A subject in itself is the pushes and pulls of relations between Italy's communist party and the Eastern bloc. Berlinguer's great ambition was to achieve a democratic path to communism, which meant cutting off the PCI's ties with Moscow. This is a subject that's intriguingly introduced early on in the film but nat get a bit lost thereafter in the complexity of domestic events. It is inevitable with a topic as broad as this film's that some strands get a bit lost. But this is a fascinating film and one wonders why it has not been dealt with more often. Biopics are a much-maligned but necessary form. In an interview with Screen Daily Segre explained that his extensive preparation for this fim included, two years studyng s Berlinguer’s memoirs and papers from the Communist Party archives and interviews with his family abd assicuates. He also reported in an interview notably watcing Milk and Malcolm X, whose focus on still unresolved issues and extensive use of real footage fed into his process in The Great Ambition.
The Great Ambition/La grande ambizione, 123 mins., premiered at the Rome film festival Oct. 14, 2024, and was nominated for 15 Donatello Awards. Germano won Best Actor (Migliore Attore Protagonista). Screened for this review as part of Open Roads, the Italian film series co-sponsored by Cinecittŕ and Film at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025). Showtimes:
Friday, May 30 at 3:00pm – Q&A with Andrea Segre
Thursday, June 5 at 6:00pm[/b]
SICILIAN LETTERS/IDDU (Antonio Piazza, Fabio Grassadonia 2024)
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TONI SERVILLO AND ELIO GERMANO IN SICILIAN LETTERS
ANTONIO PIAZZA, FABIO GRASSADONIA: SICILIAN LETTERS/IDDU-L'ULTIMO PADRINO (2024)
A crime movie whose action is largely epistolary isn't really an action movie
In the new film by Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia ( Sicilian Ghost Story, Open Roads 2018; Salvo, New Directors/New Films 2014), Matteo (Elio Germano), a fugitive mob boss in hiding, begins a curious mediated correspondence with a former acquaintance of his father’s, his godfather Catello (Toni Servillo), a corrupt politician who has just been released after a six-year prison sentence. Catello has come out only to be faced by a great burden of debts and suits. The authorities force him into this correspondence in exhcnage for lightening them. Said authorities hope to draw out Matteo from his lair by doing this.
Their letters find the two men quickly re-forming their friendship, but this bond is complicated by Catello's cooperation with police. In a not-very-enthusiastic Variety review in which she refers to this film as "a heavily fictionalized riff on a real-life mafia tale" Jessica Kiang points out, in polite understatement, that letter-exchanging (a lost art nowadays anyway) is "not the most cinematic of activities." This indeed proves to be the case in the complicated, confounding Sicilian Letters, the third crime film from the Italian team of Piazza and Grassadonia. There are a couple of point-blank shootings out of the blue, but most of this film is surprisingly turgid, and I spent most of the time not knowing quite whaat was going on. The Italian members of the Open Roads audience would laugh occasionally, showing that thee was some humor that eluded those for whom Italian was not the first language. At the outset I did grasp that the whole situation was distinctly dry and ironic, but how those ironies played out eluded me. This is a puzzler, and not quite suitable for non-Italian audiences, despite reported multiple home critics' awards.
One kept being hopeful, because the film features in the lead two of the greatest actors in recent Italian cinema, Elio Germano and Toni Servillo. With their performances, Germano and Servillo should give a headstart to the filmmaking duo's third cinematic effort to riff freshly on the Italian crime film. But their work remains enmired in the complicated, slow-moving action. Spoiler alert: Matteo is so deeply in hiding, he is concealed behind a slide-away door in the secret compartment of a house. Because this concealment was purely physical business, it was one part of this convoluted film that I could appreciate, if only briefly. But at two hours and two minutes, this whole effort was pretty slow going.
Sicilian Letters/Iddu-l'ultimo padrino (Iddu-the Last Godfather), 22 mins., premiered at Venice Sept. 5, 2024, showing also at Zurich, Chicago, Săo Paulo, Haifa, and some Italian film series, including the May 29-Jun. 5, 2025 Open Roads Italian series at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. Showtimes were:
Friday, May 30 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia
Wednesday, June 4 at 6:00pm
PATERNAL LEAVE (Alissa Jung 2025)
ALISSA JUNG: PATERNAL LEAVE (2025)
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LUCA MARINELLI, JULI GRABENHENRICH IN IPATERNAL LEAVE
A girl raised by her mother in Germany goes to Italy to meet her biological father
CLIP
Teenage Leo (Juli Grabenhenrich), effectively German, goes off with great determination to meet her father in Italy after a fight with her German mother in Germany, staying in touch with mom by cell phone but concealing what she's doing.
This film touches on difficult material in a cool way. The unsympathetic role of the absent father Paolo helps make everythihg feel real, unexpected, but may be a jolt for admirers of the Italian actor playing Paolo, Luca Marinelli (They Call Me Jeeg Robot, Martin Eden, a pretty big star, who's also the husband of the director.) This film is largely in English, with occasional subtitled outbursts in Italian or German.
The sheer audacity of her adventure, which causes Leo to throw up as soon as she finds her father, also makes this feel real. Nothing is polite, or goes quite the way anybody wants. Leo has a set of questions to record an interview. It doesn't work. Efforts at accomodating her while keeping her at a distance are clumsy.
Dad is a surfing coach. He lives in a van. He has a young daughter he's caring for part time; it seems he's not with this mother either. It turns out he is still a flake, fifteen years later.
There are flamingos, which figures toward the end. There is Edoardo (Arturo Gabbriellini, seen in "We Are Who We Are"), a young fellow. who bonds tenderly with Leo. He is gay. She offers to be his pretend girlfriend.
Viewers will vary on how well they like the continued clumsiness, which goes on until something happens that makes Leo and Paolo bond - sort of, enough so that he makes a truly friendly gesture or two. What patient viewers, especially Italians, may like is that Luca Marinelli enters wholeheartedly, no doubt with his director wife's help, into every inconsistent and confused side of Paolo. It's not an easy role to figure out, or to like. And thus it speaks for many actual , real life situations of this kind. The screenplay feels rough, though, lacking a center or a line of development, and the vivid first third isn't quite lived up to by the somewhat drawn-out final two thirds. But it finds many authentic moments. This is the writer-director's feature film debut, and we can look forward to her doing original things in the future.
Patrernal Leave, 111 mins., premiered at the Berlinale Feb. 15, 2025. It was screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads Italian film series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025). Showtimes:
Saturday, May 31 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Alissa Jung
Wednesday, June 4 at 8:45pm
LUCE (Silvia Luzi, Luca Bellino 2024)
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MARIANA FONATANA IN LUCE
SILVIA LUZI, LUCA BELLINO: LUCE (2024)
A factory worker on the brink of meltdown
There's not much plotline here, making this more like a short story than a book, a brief cameo, really, thoough an evocative one, because it is all so intense. Reality and dream blur in this dreamy, chaotic, disquieting film focused on a sad, dreamy-eyed, nameless young woman (Mariana Fontana, who gives her all) who seems increasingly obsessed with her incarcerated father. She is pretty, in a dark, unhappy sort of way, but she is haunted and distracted: a pale olive Madonna of the leather mills.
She works on the production line of a leather tannery in the mountainous, misty Italian South, also the setting of Open Roads' Basileia, but this time it is Solofra, in the province of Avellino. It's a tough local town and the coworkers are rude women who speak roughy to each other. There is a direct relationship subtly alluded to very early (as I learned from the review by Aldo Spiniello on Sentieri Selvaggi, the Italian movie website) between this film and the filmmakers' previous one, Il cratere,. It too focused on the morbid relationship between a father and his daughter. The unnamed protagoist of Luce lives in a world of fantasy, outside of the grim task of stretching leather in the factory, whee the supervisor punishes workers by sending them upstairs to work on the "drum," where great heavy mounds of leather have to be hand-loaded on a dumbwaiter device that takes them below.
I learn also from Aldo Spiniello that the filmmakers previously made a documentary about a factory workers' revolt called Dell'arte della guerra .. These tannery workers may be on the edge of revolt, or warring among themselves. And the lead actress worked in a leather factory for "a few months," according to Spiniella, to prepare for the role, and non-actors play her coworkers at the place for authenticity. (Authenticity amid unreality: but this is a feature of today's films.)
The young woman's self-obsession focuses on "chats" with a man on her cell phone (voiced by Tommaso Ragno) who may or may not be her father and may or may not be in prison (and who after being insinuating and cajoling, calls to tell her never to call again). She also has a fashionable young man from Milan, a "stilista," interested in her; or does she? She also loves dancing and tries to tempt others to accompany her. Dance sequences seem to have the kind of claustrophobic intensity the filmmakers like.
But we should point out hat this is a confined visual world where the camera is nearly always hovering or rocking feverishly up close on Mariana Fontana, with the field of vision very short; I was reminded of László Nemes's terrifying debut film Son of Saul (NYFF 2015). But that was the world of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. This woman's world surely isn't as fatal and threatening as that. But it's barely more cheerful.
As a frenetic counterpoint there is a young man who's a photographer and makes liberal and somewhat dubious use of drones to spy on people from above, and he collaborates with the young woman, putatively to photograph her father from above the prison. He may be interested in the young woman, and vice versa. He speaks in a high pitched voice and in a disquietingly nervous, machinegun fashion. The whole film is nervous, haunted, frenetic, disturbing in its mood.
Peter Bradshaw saw this film at Locarno and reviewed it in the Guardian nine months ago. He pointed out how it's never clear what is dream and what is reality, or whether everything is a dream, and the puzzles are left unsolved at the end. He concluded that for him the whole film is a "puzzle" about "how we see ourselves, or invent ourselves." But if so only temorariliy, one hopes, because this whole film, beautiful to look at and disquieting, feels very much like the product of a fevered imagination, hovering on the brink of meltdown.
Luce, 93 mins., premiered at Locarno Aug. 9, 2024, and also showed at the Rome Festival in Oct. Screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads, the Italian film festival at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025). Showtime:
Saturday, May 31 at 9:00pm – Q&A with Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino
WEIGHTLESS/SULLA TERRA LEGGERI (Sara Fgaier 2024)
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SARA FGAIER: WEIGHTLESS/SULLA TERRRA LEGGERI (2024)
Online live interview (English subtitles available)
TRAILER
WEIGHTLESS:
Review by
reygadasfan
★★˝
This had so much potential... poetic analog footage, interesting places, good editing jumping between past and present, but they ruined it with overly cliché dialogues and love story moments, overly dramatic and divine music. Had they known where to stop this could have been a much better film...
or a fine treatment of neurodegenerative disease, one thinks recently of Mia Hansen-Lřve's excellent One Fine Morning/ Un beau matin. (NYFF 2022) in which Léa Seydoux stars with Pascal Greggory, though he and his disease are only one panel of the film.
[blurb]
In her debut feature, which premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, Sara Fgaier has crafted an emotionally and formally sophisticated monument to the link between cinema and memory. Ethnomusicologist Gian (Andrea Renzi) has suddenly developed amnesia; following a failed suicide attempt, his daughter Miriam (Sara Serraiocco), whom he no longer recognizes, gives him a diary he wrote in his twenties that details a love affair with a mysterious woman. A deluge of flashbacks (punctuated with striking use of archival footage) follows as Gian seeks to recover his memory of this woman while also asking himself how he could’ve forgotten her in the first place. A stylish and assured debut, Weightless sensitively and thougHt through. TRAILER Nicolas Bell review
Sunday, June 1 at 1:00pm – Q&A with Sara Fgaier
Wednesday, June 4 at 4:00pm
WHERE THE NIGHT STANDS STILL/COME LA NOTTE (Liryc Dela Cruz 2025)
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JENNY LLANTO CARINGAL, TESS MAGALLANES, AND BENJAMIN VASQUEZ BARCELLANO JR. IN COME LA NOTTE/WHERE THE NIGHT STANDS STILL
LIRYC DELA CRUZ: WHERE THE NIGHT STANDS STILL/COME LA NOTTE (2025)
Risky reunion
A blogger at the Berlinale said this was "basically an amateur movie" but was the most touching thing they saw at the whole Berlin film festival, so far anyway." I was less enchanted. The look of the black and white images is handsome, and the acting of the three Filipino actors is naturalistic. All the torments of the Filapino diaspora are touched upon. But while this has the look and "slow cinema" style of an art film, it seems a wasted opportunity to inform and entertain us and comes across, alas, as largely a vacuous effort. Its long stillnesses - minutes devoted to watching the three snooze silently in lawn chairs, or standing around, or (more interesting) getting out of bed and saying a morning prayer - don't create any real tension, or deelop character. The film has a sudden, unexpected final event that is unprepared, and whose possible consequences are unexplained.
In the film a pious Filipina woman of a certain age, Lilia (Tess Magallanes) is visited by her tormented younger brother Manny, (Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr, reportedly the only seasoned film actor in the cast) and her equally disapproving sister Rosa (Jenny Llanto Caringal) at the very old mansion in Rome she has recently inherited from the woman she has long worked for, who died painfully of Covid, and had no family. The siblings have not met in a long time, and there are many submerged painful feelings. Rosa and Manny both think Lilia should sell the mansion and return to the Philippines, where they think she would be happier. Or do they just feel she is selfish to sit on this valuable property and not share its proceeds with the family she came to this country to help in the first place?
Lilia speaks of several suitors, and a use of social media to meet men. Her character is ambigous because she prays piously morning and evening and moves about quietly and humbly in the house, but at the tasty outdoor luncheon she has prepared for the three of them she sounds feisty, maybe a dame with a late bloom in her. On the other hand she says later she will not live much longer, even as she has touted the wonderful completely free Italian health system and shown that she makes careful use of it and looks after herself. She also has sleeked down white hair that looks fashionable, and this is somewhat ambiguously set off by her wearing tinted glasses. She remains an enigma.
Manny has recently been fired and is out of work. Lilia suggests that he must not be doing something right, which he doesn't take well, though he later apologizes for his outburst. Not much comes from Rosa but it's clear that they have many unhappy memories of growing up, a world Lilia prefers to forget, having escaped earlier to go to Italy to earn money to support the family. In retrospect it's not clear to me whether Manny and Rosa have been working in Italy too, after coming here later, or are visiting from the Philippines. It's not spelled out, at least not in the subtitles: since all the dialogue is ih Filipino dialect some information may have been lost to anglophone viewers.
At the end there is something sudden and violent that happens, but it happens in the dark. We don't know exactly what has happened, and we have no idea why, though of course we can guess. There has been too little insight provided into the thoughts or character of Manny and Rosa. It's a very unsatisfactory ending that justifies the online comment that this is basically an amateur film - even though that is not remotely true. This is a fascinating, if frustrating film. It's just a disappointing one. Maybe Liryc Dela Cruz will do something much more successful next time. He is obviously focused on material of central importance to the Filipino diaspora in Italy that is his focus.
One couldn't help think of great drama in English about family conflict and turmoil, such as Eugene O'Neill's epic Long Day's Journey Into Night or any one of Shakespeare's history plays in which rivalries among members of royal families are played out in such rich detail. Okay, we live in a post-Beckettian world. But Beckett's minimalism is ironic, deeply resonant, and ultimately transcendent. This is a cinma of national experience but also an international film. It has to be judged by a world standard. By that standard it fails to raise a flicker on the galvanometer. This may seem breaking a butterfly upon a whieel, but there is greatness everywhere. Liryc Dela Cruz hasn't unearthed the treasures in his material. There's not enough detail here. The setting is static, and the action goes dead on the screen. But this is a young director, only 32, who may build from his acceptance into the Berlinale to further successes. He apparently is also a gifted photographer and has done everything here. With additional crew in future he can put more time into the writing.
Where the Night Stands Still/Come la notte, 75 mins., premiered Feb. 15, 2025 at the Berlinale. Screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads Italian film series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun.5, 2025). Showtimes:
Sunday, June 1 at 3:30pm – Q&A with Liryc Dela Cruz
Tuesday, June 3 at 2:00pm
FAMILIA (Francesco Costabile 2024)
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AN EARLY SCENE FROM FAMILIA
FRANCESCO COSTABILE: FAMILIA (2024)
Costabile's Familia has won thirteen nominations and six awards, but only in Italy, at Venice and the Donatello awards; it is a very Italian film. At first it seems a mere melodrama, but it is a tragedy, a modern one.
I began with the melodrama idea and thought, "Netflix movie." And then I realized it was an Italian tragedy with a modern sociological understanding brought to such a high, fascinating pitch I didn't want it to end. If you are anything like me, you will not mind its two-hour length.
With our modern underdstanding of family tragedy so we think it is doomed because it is dysfunctional. It's tormented by abuse, but never quite destroyed. The two sons stand by the mother and remain in contact with the father. It is based on the memoir of Luigi Celeste, Nonsarŕ sempre cosě. The father, Franco, is played here compellingly by Francesco Di Leva, who, with several other cast members, have received awards. Di Leva has the face of one who must have been handsome in youth but now seems worn and dangerously hardened. He is convincing as this man with a compulsive obsession about his little family, who frightens both his two sons and their hard working mother. The opening is at an early time when the two sons are only boys. Frando'w wife Licia (an excellent Barbara Ronchi) has taken steps to formallly eliminate Franco from family responsibility and changed the lock on the door. She wants to have no more to do with him, and to cut him off from their two sons, the older Luigi (Francesco De Lucia, as a boy, later Francesco Gheghi) and schoolboy Allesandro (Stefano Valentini then, later Marco Cicalese). He is a machinist but has gone to jail for an attempted bank robbery.
Licia's steps eventually cause the caribinieri to come and not only take away Franco, who goes to prison, but the two sons, who are ripped also from their mother and have to spend four years apart even from each other. This segment ends with this horrific scene of running and being chased down. This is where the film feels like it loves nothing but vionece and shouting, melodrama.
Francesco Costabile has opted for high pitched but less surreal and poetic style here than in her 2022 Code of Silence/Una Femmina (Open Roads 2022), though Frederico Rizzo in the Italian movie website Sentieri Selvaggi observes that the "dreamlike and symbolic aspect" is "fundamental to Costabile's way of making cinema." This one is less dreamy, however, as well as in more mainstream Italian as well. Sometimes Italian film critics seem more fascinated with their own theories about films than the films themselves.
This is Rome, a grim, working class part of it with old buildings that have no beauty. In the next segment boys, out to play, are lured by their father, now out of prison, who approaches them unknown by Licia. Alessandro tries to follow his mother aat first and reject him but when he takes the too poor kids to an amusement park for rides and games all afternoon, and shows the boy hos to shoot a pistol to knock down objects he gives in, and they have a hart time explaining their long absence to Lizia and the big teddy bear Alessandro won.
Soon Franco has forced his way back into the family, through the oboys, who let him in, deapite the changed lock. Life with him is impossibly. Franco is jealous and suspicous over nothing: he thinks her boss is having sex with her. She like other abused women is addicted somehow to her abuser, as well as afraid of him.
In the next segment, Luigi, who repressed his trauma, has begun to play it out by joining a neofascist skinhead band. The film gives way for a while to surging episodes of shouuting and chanting, Luigi gets muscles and tattoos, but still he lives with his mother. He also acquires a girlfriend, Giulia (Tecla Insolia, who won a most promising young actor award, and has fans already), sweet and innocent but also tough. She knows of Luigi's fascist period but hopes he has gotten over it. (The Open Roads blurb may be right that the memoir is "a staggering account of the author’s falling in with a group of ultra-right-wing skinheads," the movie is about the tragedy of a family.)
A memorable scene is one where Giulia comes to dinner at home with Luigi's mother, father, and brother and there is a fight between Franco and Licia, hidden behind doors. The couple has to leave early. This is a good picture of how family violence seeps out to others even when they are trying to hide it. Luigi will believe to the end that he is not like his father though that fear is raised.
The drama goes on and on because Franco keeps getting kicked out and forcing his way back into the famiy and the two young men remain living with their mother, while her fear of him and subjection to him are vividly whown. A climax comes after Franco comes to threaten Luigi at his workplace, and reveals that he is carrying a knife - which later he reveals he sleeps with at their home under his pillow. The screenplay very neatly and quietly but suspensefully builds to a pitch of danger here.
Familia premiered at Venice in its Orizzonti section Sept. 1, 2024, with many award nominations, opening to admiring reviews in Italy a month later. It has opened in Brazil and France and shown at several Italian film series. It got four awards at Venice, Best Casting and Best Actor for Francesco Gheghi, Best Film for Francesco Costabilie, Best Young Actor for Tecla Insolita, and another award for the director. It got nine Davide di Donatello nominations but only one award, to Francesco Di Leva for Best Supporting Actor.I It was screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads italian film series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025. Showtimes:
Sunday, June 1 at 8:30pm
Thursday, June 5 at 8:45pm
BATTLEFIELD (Gianni Amelio 2024)
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ALESSANDRO BORGHI IN BATTLEGROUND/CAMPO DI BATTAGLIA
GIANNI AMELIO: BATTLEFIELD (2024)
An earnest anti-war picture that fails to come to life
Gianni Amelio’s sober First World War drama is an issue picture whose anti-war concerns are of eternal relevance. There is no question about the film's good intentions and the commitment of the lead performances. How unfortunate, then, that the action drags, the mood is torpid, and that the mise-en-scčne is weak on detail. Wendy Ide's summary analysis in Screen Daily is that while Amelio's tale has "a humanistic empathy" - and it has that in spades, there is a "somewhat disjoinnted storytelling" so that the film's "flow is repeatedly disrupted." In other words there is no rhythm or strong forward movement.
Jordan Mintzer in Hollywood Reporter calls this film "sober but overly academic." Jessica Kiang in Variety is if anything even harsher, calling this a "turgid medical drama" and a "drab period picture" that is "stultifyingly serious."
Amelio was impressive in his 1992 The Stolen Children and 1994 Lamerica and touching in his 2001 Cosě ridevano and 2004 Le chiavi di casa, but has been a letdown since. In Open Roads two years ago, his Lord of the AntsI was an interesting recreation of a court case showing Italy's uneasy relationship with homosexuality, but it got a stilted treatment. The same is true here, only worse, becaause Amelio has set himself a greater task and fallen further short.
We are conronted here with heavy ethical issues. It's the end of World War I at a northern Italian military hospital where three companions of youth and fellow medical school students are thrown together amid an unwieldy number of desperate patients whose horror of returning to battle seems often greater than their nonetheless awful injuries. And then it all becomes irrelevant when as the war winds down the Spanish flu pandemic takes over and wipes out everybody.
There are some colorful and disturbing patients seen early in the film, desperate, shell-shocked individuals, shattered and shivering, and a man blinded in one eye who appears willing to be blinded in the other to insure being sent home instead of back to the front. There is a stark dichotomy between the two doctors the film follows, along with a nurse whose presence brings out other isssues. They have all been in medical school together. Stefano (Gabriele Montesi) is from a well-off background, patriotic, wants only to send back his patients quickly to the front. Giulio (Alessandro Borghi) is from a modest family and hates war, and is ready to break the rules, even commit treason, for the terrorized patients. One understands Giulio's guilt at the idea of sending impoverished and illiterate southern Italian men back to battle when he himself haas evaded combat.
Both seem rather stiff individuals in Amelio's vdrsion of 1918 medical men. Perhaps the woman sent to help them is meant to loosen things up with romance as well as a feminine point of view. It seems both men are interested in Anna (Federica Rosellini), who was brilliant in medical school and shouldn't be just a nurse but was derailed to that status by a sexist system. She however is just as stolid a character as the two doctors.
Giulio is a bacteria specialist, which makes him more of an expert when the pandemic sweeps in. But his most notable activity is that in a little space ostensibly set aside for his test tube work, he has set up a surgery theater, and here he administers unnecessary or only marginally necessary amputations or venereal disease infections to insure that soldiers terrified of returning to battle will not have to. Is Giulo meant to be noble or is he something of a creep? In any case this storyline feels distinctly creepy. Both self-inflicted and medical-assisted injuries to escape combat duty are a repulsive prospect. But then we have not seen what the kiling fields of World War I combat duty looked like.
While the slow, jerky action and almost zombie-like solemnity of the leads here are distracting enough to make a critic as restrained as Jessica Kiang call the action "turgid," there is also a lack of medical detail, or specificity in the day to day war action. What is detailed is the prostetics for amputations and the makeup department's range of suppurating lesions, crusting and oozing eye infections and gangrenous wounds wrapped in torn, disintegrating bandages. It would have been nice to see one thing done right. The impression is that all Italian medicine had to offer at this point was beds.
It is hard to know how to take Giulio. His interventions to make patients worse so they may be sent home leads to the execution by firing squad of at least one of his patients, which we witness. Somewhat implausibly, Stefano takes quite a while to figure out that Gilulo is the "Holy Hand" intervening to save soldiers from fighting and return them maimed to their humble farms or other labor.
It feels that Amelio's involvement in the moral and ethical issues here overwhelmed his command of the environment and the historical situation. This film's screenplay by Amelio and usual collaborator Alberto Taraglio is loosely based on the popular recent novel La Sfida/The Challenge by doctor-author Carlo Patriarca. In the book all this may work better; I have not read it.
Battlefield/Campo di battaglia, 104 mins., premiered Agu. 31, 2024 at Venice, showing also at Rio, Madrid, and Argentina festivals. Screened for this review as part of Open Roads, the Italian film festival at Lincoln Center, New York (May 31-Jun.5, 2025. Showtimes:
]Monday, June 2 at 6:00pm
Wednesday, June 4 at 1:30pm
WISHING ON A STAR (Peter Kerekes 2024)
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PETER KEREKES: WISHING ON A STAR (2024)
An Italian astrologer sends her cleints around the world in search of their dreams
The eccentricity of this film, about an astrologer who sends people on trips, made me think of the Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Sorin, whose little film, Historias Intimas, charmed me so much. That was twenty years ago, and Peter Kerekes is a Slovak filmmaker who is making sometning different from Sorin's stories: a docu-fiction hybrid. But this film is quaint a little bit in the same way as Sorin's.
THe astrologer is called Luciana de Leoni D'Asparedo, and she lives in Udine, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy; we hear some of the clipped Friulian dialect spoken by one man and his domineering mother. Luciana believes in change. To prove it, as the film opens she and her husband throw a bunch of furniture and objects off the balcony of their offbeat turreted apartments at year's end, then gather these things and burn them, to "make room for the new." The film us built around Luciana, this quite engaging and rather attractive, cigarette-puffing, spiky-haired lady, her sessions with clients, and followups or background checks, sometimes rapidly intercut and abrupt, on those clients who follow her instructions, or don't and are as they say, or not. Luciana has a sort of magnetism. Of Luciana, the director has said, "I may not believe in astrology, but I believe in her," and we do too.
After exploring the clients' wishes or worries, much like a psychotherpist, instead of prescribing antidepressants or scheduling months of further sessions, Luciana practices the art of astrocartography. She sends them off to an exotic place, following ia system based on the notion that if people celebrate their birthdays at a location calculated in relation to their horoscopes, rebirths will occur for them or they will achieve their dreams. Usual ones, she says, are to get rich, find true love, or make the emptiness go away. "Love," her daughter suggests, "is a bit overvalued." One of the female clients at least does want a man, and humorously yells that from a tower.
Luciana prescribes birthday jaunts to places as far flung as Anchorage (Alaska), Săo Paulo (Brazil), Hobart (Tasmania), Bridgetown (Barbados), and Mumbai (India). Thereis also Taiwan (Taipei, I guess), and more strange-sounding places.
Perhaps these eccentric sessions and varied rituals, whatever their success in themselves, lead people to find the change they want, or to come to terms with things being the same. Indeed Luciana's husband says at the year's end assessment "Sto bene cosě": he's fine the way he is. She however states her desire is to return to Naples, where she was born. That may be a big one. But if she can throw her furniture out the window, maybe she can make her way back to Naples from Udine somehow.
To make her arcane birthday trip determinations Luciana uses a book with yellowed pages with lots of numbers, a magnifying glass, a keyboard and a computer monitor with either two circular diagrams with numerous lines crossing them, or a program that looks like the ones used by bureaucrats in government offices (I'm quoting here Sergei Tarasov's detailed description on Letterboxd).
The place named is usually quite unexpected, and far away. A young mother sent to Alaska can't go, so she's suggested to make believe, and she and her daughter soak their bare feet in bowls of ice while sitting in thecompany of a giant model of a polar bear in their living room. They can't do the foot-freezing for long, though.
Another person does go to Taiwan. The very nice looking seventy-year-old woman whose mother's death frees her goes somewhere eastern European, I think, and when she takes a dip in the water in wintertime the police take her to the station, but they think she may be crazy: should they go to a doctor for an assesssment first?
There is a forceful, not entrely appealing pair of red headed twins who say they are opposites. (Why, then, are they dressed and coiffed identically?) One wants to have a baby, and the other doesn't. So they make a plan: one of them will have a baby and then she'll pass it on to her twin to raise the child.
It makes me uncomfortable for the sequences of the young woman married to the cold macellaio (butcher) to be intercut repeatedly with shots of him cutting up meat on a table. Sometimes Peter Kerekes shows no restraint. But in its heart this is a warm, cheerful, and human work, and I'm not sure Carlos Sorin would not have filmed the butcher that way too.
In 2021, Kerekes picked up the Venice Orizzonti award for best screenplay alongside Ivan Ostrochovský for 107 Mothers, which presented the stories of women in the Odesa prison in Ukraine.
Wishing on a Star, 99 mins., premiered Aug. 31, 2024 at Venice Orizzonti, also at Toronto, Chicago, Seville and numerous other European festivals. Reviewed at Tallin by Wendy Ide for ScreenDaily. Screened for this review as part of the FLC-Cinnecittŕ Open Roads Italian film series at Lincoln Center. Showtime:
Monday, June 2 at 8:30pm
CANONE EFFIMERO (Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio 2024)
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GIANLUCA AND MASSIMILIANO DE SEVERIO: CANONE EFFIMERO (2024)
With local traditiional music of Italy, a spell is woven
A documentary that won a prize at the Berlinale about fading musical culture and customs in various parts of Italy. Moving through Italy’s regions, the De Serio brothers come across an alternative popular culture and shoot a rectangular film about polyvocal songs, music ethnology and oral tradition. Radically contemporary, energetic, close to nature, local. Lyrical.
What begins as an ode to the slow pace at which a zampugna, a form of Calabrian bagpipe, is made, opens out into an ethnological musical tour into unchartered territory: an Italy of countless small traditions, often only passed on orally. In Canone effimero, brothers Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio present eleven local customs of performing music, passed down over generations which have survived to this day for them to find, from regions as different as Calabria, Marche, Liguria and Sicily. The square frames of the film continually find new ways to combine landscapes and their inhabitants into one unit. With calm and care and in suitably choral fashion, Canone effimero conveys a sense of the transgenerational based on practising, listening, learning and the human skill for imitation. Despite of each tradition being deeply rooted in nature as well as the region from which it originated, the film is free of the sort of nostalgic campanilismo that gets drunk on its own localities. Instead, it gradually weaves together the different local traditions into a network of possible countercultures. A film that seems anachronistic at first glance, but proves to be radically contemporary.
These strong, harsh, almost raucous, forceful voices in unison, all men or all women, singing together in thespace and theair of a small chapel or local mountain church: a holy sound, an ancient sound, almost the sound of early Christians, with their courage and simple faith.
In this film we hear and see moments of transcendence. Sometimes the raucous sound is so harsh we needthe pauses of silence, devoted to scenery, hills, mountains, trees. whispered voices as if afraid of awakening a ghost or offending a little brother Beniamino who died at seven months, making her feel always like a survivor.
These folk are preservationists, but that's the wrong word, becausethey are doing nothing so arfitiial but rather growing into a tradition the were born close to. But it takes effort, like exercizing a muscle to keep it strong when age is weakening it.
Letterboxd guy Blahr (four stars) says "If Les Blank was Italian and into landscapes instead of food" he'd have made this picture. He lovedit though it "arguably short-shrifts most of the covered traditions, going for fleeting textures rather than depth." This is true. "Sounds insane," he says, but he wanted more Calabrian bagpipe. That's true too: the demonstrations of the instruments and kinds of music need to be more extended.
Canone effimero, 120 mins., premiered at Berlin, where it won a documentary special mention. Screened for this review in FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (May. 29-June 5, 2025)
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