Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2024

[Chris Knipp]

FRANZ ROGOWSKI IN LUBO

GIORGIO DIRITTI: LUBO (2023)

Important issue lost in a meandering tale

Giorgio Diritti film's I've previously reviewed in Italian series are L'uomo che verrà/The Man Who Will Comel (2009), about a WWII German massacre, the self-discovery piece Un giorno devi andare/A Day Will Come (2013), and Hidden Away/Volevo nascondermi (2020) about Italy's most famous "naive" artist and featuring Elio Germano. These show a tendency to try quite different things, and to go for powerful issues. This time he finds a good one, but it gets lost along the way. He turns to the story of an itinerant artist of Yenish descent called Lubo Mos er (Franz Rogowski) whose children become victims of a eugenics-influenced Pro Juventute’s Kinder der Landstrasse scheme while he is away drafted into the Swiss army defending its order as WWII looms.. He sets out to find them. Franz Rogowski is typically arresting in the role of Lubo.

Italian director, German actor, Yenish theme. Adapted from Mario Cavatore’s 2004 novel Il seminatore which, one hopes, makes more sense than this ridiculously meandering film, which loses its points about the terrible wrong of eugenics-inspired child-stealing in favor of a portrait of the strange Lubo, and cannot seem to figure out how to end - running at least 40 minutes overtime while Lubo checks in and out of hotels and gets in and out of trouble.

Somewhere past midway we see Lubo endlessly search through index cards trying to find what has happened to his children. But while that futile effort may be the heart of the film in a way, it's just an incident. First, when he learns his children are goine and his wife has died, he deserts from the Swiss army guards, and joins up with a shady Jewish trafficker called Bruno Reiter (Joel Basman) to cross the border, and then kills him for his car (which he has to teach himself to drive) and his identity. As part of this process, he smashes the man's head in, which the director and cinematographer Benjamin Maier kindly show from a distance, in the dark . He discovers the car is loaded with a great store of valuable jewelry. And from that much follows, taking us far from the search for lost children and redress of wrong practices.

As Bruno Reiter, getting a pal to switch his photo in Reiter's passport, Lubo puts on the manner and clothes of a high liver, and seeks out the authorities responsible for the disappearance of his and other Yennish children. Following the advice of a clan elder, he begins serially seducing well-off, putatively racist women. First comes the well-connected gallerist Elsa (Noémi Besedes) and then banker’s wife Klara (Cecilia Steiner) falls for him. Klara gets pregnant with Lubo’s baby. As Jessica Kiang says in her Variety Venice review, these serial seductions of women he detests are nothing but "a grossly protracted form of rape."

It's not that the film is pretending Lubo is an admirable person or that his revenge in this form is justified: it's that everything that slowly unfolds involving Lubo, now Bruno, takes us far away from the cruel and immoral Swiss "Kinder der Landstrasse" ("Children of the Road") program this story highlights, the starting point and endpoint - the point, one would think - of this tale.

A FilmStart review explains that the film "unmasks a shocking system that was intended to eradicate traveling peoples like the Yenish by simply assimilating their offspring into 'normal' society (not to mention the pedophile involvement of leading officials). But in its noticeably inflated running time, the drama meanders through several decades in such a monotonous and emotionally muted way that the unquestionably important message is rarely able to unfold its full effect, despite the high-class leading actor."

Franz Rogowski is excellent to play complex, partly unsympathetic protagonists, as we've seen in Christian Petzold's Transit and Ira Sachs' Passages. But he can never quite get a handle on Lubo, because the film can't. And nearly every critic would agree that Lubo's screenplay is overblown in a leaden way. On and on it goes, and never knows when it should end was forty minutes ago. The tendentious score by Marco Biscarini announces dozens of climaxes that never come.

Lubo, 170 mins., debuted Sept. 7, 2023 at Venice, also showing at Zurich, London, chicago, and Thessaloniki. A Shadow Distribution release. Screened for this review as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center (May 30-Jun. 6, 2024). Showtimes at the Walter Reade Theater:
Saturday, June 1 at 4:00pm – Q&A with Giorgio Diritti cancelled due to director's illness.
Thursday, June 6 at 2:00pm