Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2023

[Chris Knipp]

MARIO MARTONE: NOSTALGIA (2022)


PIERFRANCESCO FAVINO IN NOSTALGIA

You can't go home again

Ermanno Rea’s last novel, published posthumously in 2016, has been brought to life on film here in a feature starring Pierfrancesco Favino, who played Tommaso Buscetta in Marco Bellocchio's 2019 Mafia "pentito" epic Il Traditore or The Traitor. This is smaller stuff in comparison, but still a haunting portrait of the filmmaker's native Naples with a blunt, shocking end, and an opportunity for Favino to be charismatic and mysterious as a man who returns to his home town, which he left at age fifteen, after forty years. This is almost like a fable, or an illustration of Thomas Wolfe's title, You Can't Go Home Again. A few of the details are a little hollow, but the whole thing is still resonant.

We first see Felice Lasco (Favino) arriving on an Egyptian plane where he is addressed in Arabic by the flight attendant, coming back to Naples for the first time after forty years abroad, to find his little, agèd mamma (the tiny but tremendous Aurora Quattrocchi), almost blind, to have a late-life reunion. There is an unforgettable scene where he carries her into a tomblike room and tenderly bathes her.

Strangely, since he has a beautiful Egyptian wife (Sofia Essaïdi) in Cairo (but no children), Felice turns out later to be planning to move back to the place he left as a teenager. Wealthy now, he immediately buys a nice apartment for his mum to replace the tiny flat a relative has moved her to, selling the nice one on an upper floor he grew up in.

This isn't the only questionable stuff that's been going on. Well, it's Naples, and not only that, but his native Sanità district, where the Catacombs are, near Capodimonte, is dominated or terrorized by what was Felice's best pal, Oreste Spasiano (Tommaso Ragno), now a crime boss known as O malommo ("The Bad Man"). As youths they carried out petty crimes together, and a murder is why young Felice left never to return. A few flashbacks in Super8 format bring back those early days and the young Feli' and Ore' (Emanuele Palumbo and Artem) in the smaller format, sunnier and brighter but with one horrible trauma.

He connects now with a priest known as Don Luigi (Francesco Di Leva), based on a real person (don Antonio Loffredo) who's like a social worker helping protect youth from crime and danger and involved with a youth orchestra and also a boxing gym. When Felice reveals his connection to Oreste aka O malommo, everyone tells him to go back to where he came from, including Raffaele (Nello Mascia), an older man who knew him whom he doesn't remember. Nonetheless against warnings, after the abrupt death of his mother, he is drawn back to his old friend, whose empire seems in decline and perhaps his health. Handsome but seedy O malommo, with his long white hair and beard, seems like an animal who is more dangerous because he is wounded.

This is tasty material, and not much has to happen because the situation becomes so constantly ominous and the city, nicely brought to life here by dp Paolo Carnera, is the other main character, beautiful, cozy (rather like Cairo but with more ornate, baroque architectural decoration), friendly, and full of menace. It's not implausible even though he's rich and happy and fluent in Arabic that a man might feel his native Napoli calling, still it's a little hard under these special circumstances to understand how Felice, who's had an apartment vandalized and a motorbike burnt to a crisp, would be so foolish, or for that matter why his pretty Cairene wife Arlette would be so into joining him to live in Naples now.

It's a dark and pretty story, a little like one by Paul Bowles. A fine return to contemporary drama for Mario Martone and another feather in the cap of the estimable and sympathetic Pierfrancesco Favino, playing the returning traveler of legend, a mystery man who's been gone so long he's forgotten the Italian word for sponge (spugno) and seems to have converted to Islam. Not perfect certainly, but great stuff nonetheless, this atmospheric film is two hours yet it feels as compact as it is tense, and there is not much fat on its bones. A good advertisement for the novels of Ermanno Rea. Recommended.

Nostalgia, 117 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition May 2022, eight other festival showrings listed on IMDb. Breaking Glass Films has US distribution rights: in theaters from Jan. 20, 2023, VOD and on digital Feb. 21. Metacritic rating: 76%.
Also included in Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center (June 1-18, 2023).
Saturday, June 3 at 5:30pm (Q&A with actor Tomasso Ragno)

[Chris Knipp]

PAOLO VIRZÌ: DRY/SICCITÀ (2022)


SILVIO ORLANDO (CENTER) IN DRY/SICCITÀ

Virzì's most choral film

Almost at the center of this symphonic "comedy" - if you can make a comedy about Rome running out of water - is Loris (Valerio Mastandrea), gray hair in a bun behind his head, sweaty, nervous, stressed, chauffeuring a dingy limo talking to passengers - who aren't really there. A long time ago, 2007 to be exact, I reviewed a movie starring Mastandrea, much younger of course, who was a would-be musician called Stefano. I described another character, the brother, as one who "survives on manic energy and a variety of antidepressants" and is "clearly at the end of his tether in more ways than one." How little things have changed. The brothers are members of an industrial family on the skids because their big fruit packing company is rudderless and in debt. The business "is showing huge losses," I wrote. "Everything is in hock, and the workers are owed three months' pay."

That is the sort of situation going on here, even though it's more ecological than economic. Though Rome is running out of water - which we don't really see so much; there still seems to be plenty, just not as much - the problem is aggravated by the corruption and confusion of the local bureaucrats and politicians, who are covering up and dodging the issue. I described the 2007 film as mostly made up of "mildly manic and often amusing set pieces that move us around among its multiple locations with a steady rhythm." Check. That film was Gianni Zanasi's Don't Think About It/Non pensarci. Mastandrea's job is more sedentary this time (he's 51 now, was 36 then). The "mildly manic" scenes involve other actors. Mastrandrea though, imploding in his car, is great. He expresses the disorder, the madness of the Rome of this film perhaps better than anybody else.

Virzì's problem in this film is partly that it really is a disaster film, and he doesn't know how or hasn't the means of lacks the ingenuity to convey something so expensive as the capitol of Italy running out of water. (It's actually running out all over the country, even more expensive to depict.) It's not a good sign that The Hummingbird director Francesca Archibugi wrote the screenplay here: The Hummingbird is a film quite blithe about being too complicated to follow. There's uncertainty in the conception here. It's a three-year drought. Is that so bad? Well, really, how bad is it? Bad enough so the Tiber river has dried up as CGI overhead shots of it show us. There is focus also on a possible epidemic appearing at the Policlinico. There's a fancy thermal baths owned by a Trump-like corrupt family whose mouthpiece declares to a displeased and skeptical public that the considerable amount of water it uses is obtained "privately," brought in in tanks daily. (It's not true.)

So the focus shifts to disease and to corruption and deception, not just the water supply as such. As Jonathan Romney says in his Screen Daily review, the audience is left "gasping" by all the "narrative plate-spinning." But as he also says, the whole thing will probably make more sense to the local audience, for whom many of the cast members are well-known faces. Another one is Tomasso Ragno, who plays out of work actor turned social media personality Alfredo, who polishes his online image while his wife Mila (Elena Lietti) works in a supermarket and plans to hook up on the side with a lover. Alfredo’s ex-wife Sara (Claudia Pandolfi) has something more serious to deal with: confronting the new disease. Wisdom about the relation of poverty to waterlessness is provided by young African asylum seeker Sembene (Malich Cissé). In contrast an initially sensible and knowledgable professor of hydrology (Diego Ribon) is dazzled and becomes corrupted in a single day by the fame the new crisis has brought him.

The scenes with Valerio Mastandrea in the car still remain the ones we can dig our teeth into. His scenes are matched in soulfulness, though, with those involving the popular actor Silvio Orlando as Alfredo, an aging accidentally released prisoner, now wandering around and exploring his past. Meanwhile there is a glitzy movie star featuring Monica Belluci playing a version of herself, and a cameo by Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho. Romney points out there is a lighter touch here than in Crash or 21 Grams (Yes, there is that.)

This material is still way too complicated and disjointed when introduced. But it begins to flow together and make more sense toward the last of the over two hour runtime. As various critics note, the choral effect and flow resemble Virzì's Human Capital, though the comparison is misleading because the latter is so neatly held together and provided with a satisfying outcome by a kind of murder mystery. Romney generously concludes that Dry is overall "an intelligent, ambitious modern melodrama with a bracingly cynical streak." I can still only wanly recommend it, but there are good scenes.

Dry/Siccità, 124 mins., debuted at Venice Sept.8, 2022, showing at a hanfful of other small European festivals and releasing in Italian theaters Sept. 29, 2022. Screened for this review as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (June 1-8, 2023).
Friday, June 2 at 6:00pm (Q&A with actor Tomasso Ragno)
Thursday, June 8 at 3:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERTO DE PAOLIS: PRINCESS (2022)


GLORY KEVIN IN PRINCESS

Force of nature

The followup to De Paolis' warm-hearted young love story Pure Hearts (Open Roads 2018) this film about a robust Nigerian prostitute in a pink wig has been called "contemporary fairy-tale cinéma vérité" in an Italian review.

Kevin Glory, who plays "Princess," is a force of nature, whose confidence and vivacity spread throughout a film about prostitution in the fringes of Italian cities, about immigrants living in the country, and about Italian relations with local-based foreigners.

Princess works on the road alongside a forest in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome, living in an illegal encampment of cabins (everything is illegal about their existence) with other Nigerian streetwalkers in the forest. Her in-your-face joie-de-vivre and somewhat fantastic appearance may explain the word "fairy-tale" in the review. De Paolis spent time getting to know Nigerian prostitutes and some of them appear as themselves in the film, and this is basically more real than some Italians may want to believe. But the confusion of elements is a problem in a film whose protagonist takes over whatever story the filmmaker may have wanted to tell. Nonetheless, it confirms the intensity and originality of De Paolis in an era of Italian filmmakers who often seem to avoid making waves. Princess is a distinctive effort.

Lee Marshall in his Screen Daily review said "the opening slot of Venice’s parallel Horizons sidebar feels like a consolation prize for a film that would not have looked out of place in Competition." Screened for this review as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (June 1-8, 2023) sponsored by Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà.

Princess, 111 mins., debuted as the opening film of the Orizzonti section at Venice Aug. 31, 2022.
Friday, June 2 at 8:30pm (Q&A with Roberto De Paolis)

[Chris Knipp]

NICCOLÒ FALSETTI: MARGINS/MARGINI


SLINFATTI, CREATINI AND TURBANTI IN MARGINI

Wailing in the sticks

This is the tale of three young guys in long ago 2008 (Emanuele Linfatti, Edoardo; Matteo Creatini, Iacopo; and Francesco Turbanti, Michele) in a "street punk" band who live in the provincial Italian town of Grossetto. They are definitively on the margins, and what they want to achieve is frustratingly out of reach. Don't we all experience this situation sometimes? Turbanti and Falsetti did actually start a punk band in Grossetto, PEGS, which still exists. They're basically here having fun with their own experience, ramping up the isolation and the boredom.

Their dream is to do something big and their effort to stage a concert featuring a known US band in their hometown, frustrated at every turn, is funny, a little heartbreaking and ultimately heartening. It starts when they get their big chance to open for the band "The Defense" in Bologna and then the whole concert is cancelled. On a whim, they get up their courage and call The Defense and invite them to play in Grossetto. They say yes.

This is when their real trouble begins. The Defense want airfare from Russia to Italy. They have a shopping list of equipment to be supplied for their gig that a local entrepreneur says will cost them 4,000 euros to rent. Then one of the three, who plays classical cello, gets a replacement gig he can't say no to - to play under the baton of Daniel Barenboim - and the rehearsal is scheduled the day of the Grossetto punk concert.

"Miche" in his late twenties is the most passionate and the oldster of the trio, who has a long-suffering wife, Margherita (Silvia D’Amico) and school-age daughter. "Iac" and "Edo" still live at home and get their laundry done for them. They are all in a way grownup children, but above all they are losing themselves in the violent noise of late blooming Italian punk music - and the struggle to get it heard locally - to escape the boredom and very un-Italian ugliness of this town in the Maremma (once swampland) that no tourist ever visits, or Italian either. Its abandoned weed-infested little traffic circle, a visible road to nowhere, is its signature image.

And this is of course a tale of male bonding and togetherness. When Iac is presumably out of the planned big gig - for which they have found neither the venue nor the equipment - he still participates in the desperate but enthusiastic efforts to pull things together. The hilarious climax in that is when they trash a hated disco, the Eden, whilst stealing a mixer they need, because they want to make it look like a burglary, and they get really carried away, smashing everything, setting off the sound system, and spraying each other with a fire extinguisher. It is, in a way, the punk concert of your dreams.

This debut film premiered in in Venice’s Critics' Week and there got favorable nods from Alex Ritman in Hollywood Reporter and Lee Marshell in Screen Daily. Marshall called Margins "a debut that may crowd-surf on good reviews and word-of-mouth well beyond its home market." It has something extra, more affectionate than mocking, more about the young male bonding than the music, but in every moment affectionate and true. The cinematography by Alessandro Veridiani is splendid and the closing credits are briliant and make you want to sing along. A tribute to the passion and togetherness of youth.

Margins/Margini, 93 mins., debuted Sept. 2, 2022 at Venice Critics' Week (Quinlan review of Margins by Raffaele Reale.) It was released in Italy Sept.8. and later shown in several other festivals. Screened for this review in Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (Jun. 1-8, 2023) at Lincoln Center in collaboration with Cinecittà.
Sunday, June 4 at 12:00pm (Q&A with Niccolò Falsetti)

[Chris Knipp]

GIUSEPPE FIORELLO: FIREWORKS/STRANIZZA D'AMURI (2023)


GABRIELE PIZZURRO AND SAMUELE SEGRETO IN FIREWORKS/STRANIZZA D'AMURI

A gay love story, an infamous hate crime, a lasting political impact

Italian TV star Giuseppe ("Beppe") Fiorello has staged an impressive directorial debut with Fireworks/Stranizza d'amuri, a gay coming-of-age romance based on real events. It takes place in an ultra-conservative Sicily of the 1980's and ends with the hate crime that gave birth to Arcigay, Italy’s first and largest LGBTQ rights group. Simply opened in Italy March 23, 2023, with no festival showings, it has received no outside reviews, but apparent acclaim in Italy. An Italian review in Quinlan by Massimiliano Schiavoni points out where the film is accurate and where it isn't - a place to start. A Variety preview lays out details of the film's creation.

Fireworks arouses strong mixed feelings. The coming of age love story is sweet and touching; the general homophobia and resulting atrocity trigger feelings of horror and repulsion. Is one touched, disturbed, uplifted, angered, galvanized? It all may seem too much to deal with at once: the innocent purity of young love, the vile machismo overflowing into hate-crime murder. And to heighten the mood even further the film moves the events from 1980, when they occurred, to the summer of 1982, when Italy was exulting over its world Cup soccer win - and also includes some spectacular up-close-and-noisy fireworks sequences.

Schiavoni says Italy has forgotten this event because it wrongly thinks it has moved on and thus it was essential to retell the story as this film does: Italy is an externally beautiful country, he writes, but has't achieved a matching beauty on the inside.

Fiorello recalls the tragic affair of the young homosexual couple Giorgio Giammona and Antonio Galatola, later remembered as Giorgio and Toni, who were shot dead in Giarre in 1980, according to the grim pattern of a murder with a clearly homophobic matrix. Having discarded the initial hypothesis of a murder/suicide triggered by the desperation of the two boys, the crime went unpunished, since the only serious suspect (and horror was added to horror) was Toni's nephew, barely 13 years old, who was not prosecutable for his age and who in any case recanted his version of events several times.

There are other complications, but the cloudy events, the fake suicide and lack of prosecution for any crime protected by traditional Sicilian omertà, are clarified in the strong reaction: in Palermo within a month the first Arcigay homosexual activist group was formed, and this was to be the foremost gay activist organization in he country. Also a lesbian group reportedly was formed.

"The crime in Giarre" - shooting the two boys in the head while hand in hand - led to the novel Stranizza by Valerio la Martire, to which this film owes a debt. But the actual Sicilian dialect title "Stranizza d'amuri" (Miracle of Love) refers to a famous song by Franco Battiato, a Giarre local, but composed in 1979 and referring to WWII but adolelscent love. It's a very famous song, and Battiato's only one in his native Sicilian dialect. The reference indicates Fiorello's desire to make his film a universal portrait of adolescence and adolescent love that "penetrates the bones" of its youthful first-timers.

Fiorello paints with a very broad brush in this film. Many adult characters are more seen than developed. It uses intense closeups, the swarthy, bearded faces of the adult men, the smooth, fresh faces of the two boys who are at the center of the story - so very, very different from François Ozon's recent, also tragic, but not quite serious, Summer of 85., which comes to mind because both teen gay romances feature romantic motorbike scenes.

Samuele Segreto is Gianni, the older, 17-year-old boy, already called mockingly "Giannuccia" and marked as a "faggot" for past behavior which may have caused him to spend time in a reformatory. He has a mean stepfather (and is probably illegitimate) and a frightened mother and his status in the tiny town is uneasy. Segreto is short, dark, and pretty with a bright and ready smile. He has some of the looks of the young Belmondo.

But smile or not, Gianni's circumstances are uneasy, so when by chance while delivering a motorbike he literally runs into Nino (Gabriele Pizzurro), Nino's unscathed reputation and relatively serene home life becomes a bridge to escape for Gianni - for a time - as well as to love. Nino assists his father, whose livelihood comes from staging fireworks displays for local fairs - an opportunity for the film to provide us with gorgeous and noisy screen-filling displays, which, if you give yourself to the style, seem not intrusive but integral: they express this world's explosive emotionality, as the rabbit-shooting scenes featuring Nino's semi-comic little bro Totò (Simone Raffaele Cordiano), express its inherent violence. Pizzurro is tall and thin with light skin and big fluffy hair. Nino loves to go off and strip down to his underpants and swim in the local river. Eventually he gets Gianni to join him.

Fiorello cunningly manipulates the World Cup not only to create climactic tension but to show Gianni and Nino's social exclusion because of their sexuality: when everybody is celebrating Italy's victory, at the ultimate moment of national brotherhood, they aren't watching but instead use the attraction of everyone's attention to go off by themselves once more. They have been forced to separate when too often they have been seen kissing. And while there is nothing like the spit-lubed butt-fucking of Brokeback Mountain, it's made pretty clear that the kissing has led to making love

I have to admit after seeing the film, and very close to the screen at the Walter Reade Theater where the visual and auditory impact was tremendous - that, though the film is a bit overlong and moves too slowly in its early reels - somehow Fiorello manages to make us feel above all else the pure adolescent feeling of the boys and the beauty of their love, despite the grim finale. It's an impactful film and one that ought to be seen outside local territories and specialized Italian cinema festivals. One wonders why it had no festival screenings to launch it for a broader audience - whether it was submitted only to Italian festivals, and rejected out of lingering unease.

Fireworks/Stranizza d'amuri, 172 mins., released theatrically in Italy with no festival exposure March 23, 2023. Screened for this review as part of the June 1-8, 2023 Film at Lincoln Center-Cinecittà series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.
Thursday, June 1 at 3:30pm (Q&A with Giuseppe Fiorello, Gabriele Pizurro, Samuele Segreto)
Tuesday, June 6 at 6:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

DAVIDE GENTILE: MY SUMMER WITH THE SHARK/DENTI DA SQUALO (2023)


TIZIANO MENICHELLI (RIGHT) CONFRONTS "TECHNO" IN MY SUMMER WITH THE SHARK/DENTI DI SQUALO

Adventurous summer

My Summer with the Shark/Dentida squalo, the new film premiered at Lincoln Center, conveys a sense of play, adventure, and courage that is infectious. It isn't always clear what may be happening to young Walter (Tiziano Manichelli), the feisty, small-for-his age 13-year-old all this is about. But his ballsy confidence and his surprising skillset (skateboarding, shark wrangling, dancing, standing up to anybody) are always in evidence. Something may have gone a bit astray in the ten-year-old screenplay and its later revisions. But first-time director Davide Gentile did something right, because the spirit of play and adventure is there.

Walter discovers a secret world for himself in the summer while his mother (Virginia Raffaele) is working in an outdoor restaurant somewhere around Rome-Ostia. Her husband, Walter's father (Claudio Santamaria) has recently died at only forty in an accident in an air purifier saving someone, or so we hear: no one particularly likes telling the truth in this movie. Rita's refers to Antonio only by talking to Walter about getting rid of his stuff. Dealing with grief and helping Walter do so aren't things Rita is particularly up for. For Walter, Antonio is still very much present, in the film's magic realist moments when he appears to provide crucial life lessons and advice.

Riding his bike on the coast near Rome Walter comes across a magnificent, seemingly abandoned estate with a tower and a large leaf-infested swimming pool. Walter strips down and jumps in. He's an excellent swimmer. The big shark that appears and starts swimming toward Walter is the first menace Walter narrowly escapes. But soon comes another one, Carlo, aka Elo aka Giancarlo, an aggressive, bigger boy who says he's the "custodian" of the property. But then appears a bigger, bearded adult who calls himself "Il Corsaro," the Pirate (Edoardo Pesce ofDogman), who later appears to have had some connection with Walter's father.

Walter becomes more a partner than a sidekick to Carlo, and he stands up effectively to The Corsair. Carlo brings Walter to Techno, recommending his sills to this mysterious miscreant who's always playing a little squeaky video game. Techno gives Walter an errand to run and he successfully completes it, his smallness and seeming insignificance providing camouflage. What is he carrying? Anyway, piles of money accrue. Rita's anger when she discovers them lead to the revelation that the boy's dead father was also involved in illegality she wants her son to avoid. That seems unlikely. But where Walter is involved, feats of boyish sprezzatura happen and fun is always to be had.

My Summer with the Shark/Denti da squalo, 104mins. Announced world premiere at Open Road: New Italian Cinema from FLC and Cinecittà Jun. 3, 2023.
Saturday, June 3 at 8:30pm (Q&A with Davide Gentile)


EDOARDO PESCE, TIZIANO MENICHELLI IN MY SUMMER WITH THE SHARK/DENTI DI SQUALO

[Chris Knipp]

MONICA DUGO: LIKE TURTLES/COME LE TARTARUGHE (2022)


MONICA DUGO, RIGHT, IN LIKE TURTLES/COME LE TARTARUGHE

Hiding a while when things get tough

Like Turtles/Come le tartarughe, the experienced actress Monica Dugo's directorial and writing debut feature, concerns a well off bourgeois housewife's extreme reaction when her husband leaves her, and their two children, and the Filipina housekeeper, and their palatial apartment in the center of Rome, to take a break, or find himself. Tina (Dugo) takes up residence in her husband's space in the family's equally spacious custom-built family armadio, their wardrobe, which he has made available by removing his clothing. She remains in touch, with the door often open, but not quite involved normally in everyday family life. She promises to come out when her husband returns.

The style of this film has been called "elegant," and it precedes with thorough smoothness and confidence. It may seem unduly whimsical and fanciful to deal with withdrawal and depression in this way. However, frivolity and fantasy are features of some of Italy's greatest contemporary artists - of Fellini, for instance, and Italo Calvino, whose Barone rampante describes a 19th-cenury nobleman who climbs up and lives the rest of his life in a tree.

"I've dealt with hikikomori cases before," says Dr. Fabrizia Storzo, the psychotherapist, whom Lisa (director/lead acdtor Monica Dugo)'s grumpy tennis-playing teenage daughter Sveva (a forceful Romana Maggiore Vergano) brings to the apartment to See her after she's moved into his space in the giant family armadio(wardrobe) after her wishy-washy husband Daniele (Angelo Libri) removes his clothes and walks out. He does so, he explains to Sveva (he is still somehow in the area, and in touch) to find himself, to take a break, and not because of displeasure with Lisa but just because he's "depressed." Other characters include Sveva's poorly treated boyfriend Luca (Francesco Gheghi), rumpled-haired little brother Paolo (Edoardo Boschetti) and the Filipina housekeeper, who quits; an unseen mother-in-law who tends to call with her complaints at dinnertime. Daniele is apparently a coroner, a surgeon, as he tells seven-year-old Paolo, whose patients are in no danger of dying under the knife. For some reason he is already frequently away, and he may have lost interest in Lisa for some Time.

Lisa is pale and petulant but seems more cheerful once ensconced in the wardrobe. Her main function has been to maintain the smooth functioning of the family. She can only exert her power by disrupting it. When Dr. Storzo takes off her shoes and gets into the wardrobe to consult, Lisa launches into an angry and quite inappropriate lecture on how psychotherapy is a hoax and therapists mere money-grubbing quacks. She says they "authorize the selfishness and narcissism" of the "rich bourgeoisie" who "hide behind depression." But she expresses (to Paola) the truism "Hating is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." Her mother visits her, and offers wisdom too. Her husband probably is with another, older woman from work, with greasy hair and pockmarked face, spied by Sveva.

Glenn Kenny commented favorably on Like Turtles from Venice on RogerEbert.com saying that its commercial prospects are helped by it's being "Ferrante-adjacent," since its story relates to Elena's Days of Abandonment though less "raw and violent."

The device of the wardrobe - which can be removed after it has performed its function and Lisa has reemerged facing the new situation - is a neat one around which the screenplay neatly revolves. However the film winds up being rather fangless, as if it itself has withdrawn from the uneasy topics it caresses. (Perhaps that's what "elegant" means.) Dugo has delivered very watchable film. The images of dp Gianni Mammolotti gently remind us always that this is indeed happening in the centro storico of Rome.

Monica Dugo's directorial debut was made possible through the Venice Biennale College Cinema initiative. (A full cast list is not provided so some characters may be linked with the wrong actors.)

Like Turtles/Come le tartarughe B, 80 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2, 2022, also playing at Rio in Oct. Screened for this review as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema June 1-8, 2023 series at Lincoln Center (with Cinnecittà).
Sunday, June 4 at 5:30pm (Q&A with Monica Dugo)