Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2025

[Chris Knipp]

Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2025 (May 29- June 5, 2025): REVIEWS

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS

Basileia (Isabella Torre 2024)
Battleground/Campo di battaglia (Gianni Amelio 2024)
Canone Effimero (Gianlucca & Massimiliano De Serio 2024)
Diamonds/Siamanti (Ferzan Özpetek 2024)
Familia (Francesco Costabile 2024)
The Great Ambition/Berlinguer. La grande ambizione (Andrea Segre 2024)
Luce (Silvia Luzi, Luca Bellino 2024)
Paternal Leave (Alissa Jung 2025)
Sicilian Letters/Iddu (Antonio Piazza, Fabio Grassadonia 2024)
The Time It Takes/Il tempo che ci vuole (Francesca Comencini 2024) Opening Night Film
Vittoria (Alessandro Cassigoli, Casey Kauffman 2024)
Weightless/Sulla terra leggeri (Sara Fgaier 2024)
Where the Night Stands Still/Come la notte (Liryc Dela Cruz 2025)
Wishing on a Star (Peter Kerekes 2024)

)

[Chris Knipp]

FRANCESCA COMENCINI: THE TIME IT TAKES/IL TEMPO CHE CI VUOLE (2024) Opening Night Film


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-scène 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

[Chris Knipp]

FERZAN ÖZPETEK: DIAMONDS/DIAMANTI (2024)


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 è 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

[Chris Knipp]

\
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 Cinecittà 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]

[Chris Knipp]

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, São 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

[Chris Knipp]

ISABELLA TORRE: BASILEIA (2024)

Greedy treasure hunter arouses mother nature's ire

TRAILER

With Basileia Isabella Torre is said to be returning to the theme of her first short film, Ninfe (Nymphs), which was presented in 2018 in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival. And she shows a fascination with exploring the interface between everyday reality and an invisible world of darkness and the occult and magical. This film is partly an archeological theft thriller, partly a spooky ghost tale, partly a sort of ecological warning. But it never quite finds its rhythm in any of these modes, and is a tryng experience to watch.

A problem is the unsympathetic and irritating protagonist, a local explorer not particularly welcome in this part of the Italian South (Calabria and the Aspromonte mountains). He is known as L'Irlandese (the Irishman), when asked says he's a Scott, but in fact is played by Danish actor Elliott Crosset Hove of Godland. The Irishman is persistent in trying to bag a buried treasure he calls a "box" but keeps failing. He is injured and his presumably illegal helpers get caught in a raid of their dig by the carabinieri and his rich local sponsor, "Signor Santo," seizes the mysterious manuscript "notebook" he has been relying on, and has him kept at a nunnery. He clls someone and talks to him in Danish (I guess), showing he's perhaps conspiring with someone far away. He escapes from the clutches of Signor Santo, takes off in a car, and by the roadside hires a mysterious jobless local Burkinabé dude known as KeyKey (Koudous Seihon). But he flounders at his second effort after a second assistant hired by KeyKey, Igor, disappears. For KeyKey, not to mention Igor, he proves an unreliable and badly paying employer.

I missed Arthur, the amiable scoundrel of an archeological grave robber played by Josh O'Connor with much seedy charm and dedication in Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera. (NYFF 2023). None of that film's rich humanity or sense of the actual is captured here, nor any compensating sense of the supernatural. Since this is a film that seeks to be intriguingly withholding, I missed the way that quality works successfully in De Pallières' Adieu and Claire Denis' famous The Intruder.

Meanwhile there are the nude women with waist-length hair who wander about, making jerky head movments. Their makeup reminded me of the big-eyed creatures in W.A.Dwiggins' illustrations for H.G.Wells' The Time Machine. The locals seem to take them in stride, but the local village appears to be a ghost town anyway, except where it isn't, in the case of a church with a minister, the nunnery, and a herd of goats and a goatherd (apparently played by editor and producer Jonas Carpignano). Oh and there are the wolf hounds that prowl into an abandoned house in the opening sequence - a moment whose spookiness and energy are not lived up to, unless the rather lame naked ladies do that for you. If they are representing the invisible world of darkness and the occult, they are overburdened.

There is an effective horror-movie score by Andrea De Sica that raises the pitch from time to time, and sometmes ambient sound is well used. But there is not a well-shaped storyline to make use of this. Consequently the theme Torre wants to develop - that you don't want to mess with mother nature - doesn't come alive. The filmmaker has assembled many elements here, however, including a church service and villagers who pray for those who have disappeared. The final moments are beautiful, but inconclusive. Perhaps Ari Aster, if he went back to horror, could do something with all this. The trailer is great (see above). But you need to reassemble the elements better into a movie.

Basileia, 88 mins., premiered at Venice as the closing film of Venice Days, Sept. 6, 2024. Screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads Italian series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025). Showtime:
Friday, May 30 at 9:00pm