Movie Review: Alone With Her Dreams (2020)

Now Available

Warning his friend not to put so much stock into his dreams for the future that he loses sight of reality, in “The Shawshank Redemption,” Red (Morgan Freeman) tells Andy (Tim Robbins) that “hope is” not only “a dangerous thing,” but it can also “drive a man insane.”

Of course, for that to happen, you'd have to view hope as a good thing, which is the opposite relationship that eleven-year-old Lucia (Marta Castiglia) has with the feeling in director Paolo Licata's “Alone With Her Dreams.” Knowing of hope's pitfalls, she explains that “when a person 'hopes' to do something, they never end up doing it,” which is a lesson that her grandmother Maria (Lucia Sardo) takes to heart, quoting Lucia's words back to her in the Italian film's final act.

Applying this logic to her parents' sudden qualification that they, along with her younger brother, “hope” they can return home for Christmas after so many conversations where it'd previously been a certainty, Lucia sees the writing on the wall when she hears her least favorite word on the phone. Saying that she wishes she hadn't talked to them so she could've gone on assuming they'd come back for the holidays, Lucia begins feeling lonelier than ever, living with the stubbornly defiant Maria in her tiny hometown on the coast of Sicily, after the rest of her family fled to France to make a better living.

Caught in the middle of a family feud that goes back to her grandmother's generation – as the stern woman has forbidden Lucia from having anything to do with Maria's sister Pina (Ileana Rigano) or Pina's daughter Rosamaria (Katia Greco) – as Lucia waits to join her family in France, she struggles to find out just what led to their rift. Realizing that the truth of the situation is much darker than the gossip she's been led to believe, soon history repeats itself in a cruel twist of fate as the tragedy of the women's past threatens to envelop Lucia as well.

A sun-drenched coming-of-age saga, based upon the novel by Catena Fiorello and adapted for the screen by Licata, Fiorello, and Ugo Chiti, this languidly paced, atmospheric film takes a good thirty minutes to immerse you in its near desolate Sicilian environment. With its one store that, for a fee, will let you use a phone (which is then lowered out of the window by a rope basket) and its statue of the Virgin Mary that residents donate to in order to ask God for wishes, in this town, we feel as though we've wandered into a whole other world.

Centered on a sparsely populated seaside community where nearly everyone knows everyone else or, as in Lucia's case, is related to several other residents, “Alone With Her Dreams” seems to be set in the 1960s or '70s. Timeless, foreign, and remote, the town we find ourselves in is a far cry from the hustle and bustle of Rome, made popular by some of the biggest Italian cinema exports from the era.

Yet as “Alone With Her Dreams” begins to incorporate themes of how abuse, trauma, and shame are passed down from one generation to the next under the guise of secrets and lies, it morphs into an incredibly timely work. Additionally, it's one you just might find that you want to discuss with the women in your family tree as soon as it ends. 

Described as a “shocking... new Italian classic from the heart,” by director Oliver Stone, the film is now available on-demand from Corinth Films after a successful, award-winning, festival run. Requiring patience in viewers used to having most things spelled out for them in the first ten minutes of a movie, “Alone With Her Dreams” uses a natural approach that's more indicative of classic Italian neorealist filmmaking.

Eschewing the building blocks of most coming-of-age fare, while initially, I wasn't sure what to make of it, the film grows both more compelling and more universally relatable with each successive scene. Reminiscent of the way that the family sagas helmed by Taiwanese New Wave filmmakers preferred to let their characters live and breathe rather than try to manufacture a protracted plot out of thin air, while Licata's “Alone With Her Dreams” isn't for every filmgoer, those who stay with it will find it's a hard movie to shake.

Potent and wonderfully acted, to Licata's credit, this ensemble drama is brought vividly to life with more color and verve than we typically see in Sicilian set features, which are far too often painted purely in the shades of sun and sand. Likewise, it's a rare, vital, feminist effort about what it means to be a girl growing up in an oppressive Catholic culture where there's much more going on beneath the surface than women are traditionally allowed to discuss. 

An unusual and affecting film, in “Alone With Her Dreams,” Lucia and her Sicilian female relatives learn that, rather than hope for a spiritual intervention or the help of a man, sometimes it's better just to take care of things themselves... in whatever way they see fit. 

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Shooting the Mafia (2019)

Now Available

"The mafia kills. So does silence." The words appear on a sign at an anti-mafia rally early on Kim Longinotto's eye-opening documentary Shooting the Mafia and also serve as a great tribute to the photographer at the center of the filmmaker's biographical portrait, Letizia Battaglia, who — as the translation of her surname suggests — battles the mob by refusing to adhere to the code of silence that has kept them in power in Sicily for so long.

If a person goes missing in Corleone, Sicily, Longinotto's film informs us, no one says a word for fear of retribution. Ruling not only the meat, fish, fruit, and vegetable markets but also the funeral industry, we learn that if a person can no longer pay the mob to keep their loved one buried, they'll simply dig up their bones from the cemetery to make room for a family that can line their pockets.

Turning her lens on the economic devastation and political corruption caused by La Cosa Nostra, as the country's first female photographer hired by a daily newspaper in the form of the liberal L'Ora in the 1970s, Battaglia used her camera to prove that when it comes to the mob, fear is a luxury that Sicily can simply not afford.

An ambitious, sprawling but too often vague and disjointed chronicle of both Battaglia and the mafia's impact on Sicily over the past fifty years, it's a nonetheless fascinating introduction to a courageous iconoclast who picked up a camera at forty and was changed by it to the point that — looking back — feels she wasn't a real person before she had it in her hands.

Sharing her recollections of growing up in a world dominated by men, you feel her frustration when she discusses being locked up by her father as a beautiful teen to the point that she couldn't go out onto the balcony in case she would tempt male passersby. Later contrasting this with a spicier memory of meeting one of her many lovers on the balcony after her mercurial husband had fallen asleep, you get the sense of how being controlled and yearning to break free from men who wanted to silence her prepared her for the next forty years of her life.

Missing huge gaps of biographical information and bafflingly light on specific details including the years certain events happened, although she uses moving clips from classic Italian films to help bring Battaglia's memories to life, Longinotto struggles to tell a cohesive story throughout and seems uncertain how much of Battaglia's life to go into as opposed to her work.

Opening on Battaglia's stark, artful, hellish portraits of the aftermath of brutal mob slayings and simple yet stunning images of Corleone residents striving to live their lives under mafia rule, the film presents us with half intriguing, half murky information about our subject as well as Sicily. At its most gripping in the second half of the film when it charts how judges Falcone and Borsellino put their lives on the line to bring the mafia to justice in a historic trial with hundreds of defendants, Shooting the Mafia works extraordinarily well when it zeroes in on one specific timeline.

Unsure what story she truly wants to tell, when Longinotto focuses on the downfall of two of Corleone's most notorious mob bosses, we're left with the startling revelation that this piece of the puzzle is actually far more interesting than anything that had come before it. An intriguing if narratively unsuccessful documentary about a heroic photographer who breaks Sicily's years of silence to shout at the mafia as loud as she can with each click of her camera, I only wish the film had been as clear cut, laser focused, and determined as the woman at its center who refuses to be contained.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Three Peaks (2017)

Now Playing

You know how it goes. You meet someone and you get a crush. You start dating, you find out they have kids, and suddenly your attraction to them moves beyond all the superficial stuff. You see them together and get a glimpse at what real life with them might look like instead of the best behavior version of you both that you put on for dates.

You meet the kid(s) and hope they're as crazy about you as you are about them. You begin spending time at their house — it's easier, after all, for them — and maybe move in. Things go well at first. Every night's a slumber party until the power games start and then suddenly it's not. They take up residence in your bed and your relationship suffers as they test your limits in a mildly annoying way that could escalate if you lose your cool and handle it wrong. You're on icy terrain and you start to slip. It's harder for you if you fall; if it ends, you lose at least two and they're only out one.

And while for you it means a break-up, in Three Peaks, it could cost Aaron (Alexander Fehling) much more — a limb perhaps or maybe his life. Wanting to remedy this problem and find better footing before an avalanche, Aaron takes Lea (Bérénice Bejo), his beautiful girlfriend of two years and her eight-year-old son Tristan (Arian Montgomery) on vacation to the Italian Dolomites.

Patiently teaching Tristan to hold his breath and swim in an opening scene that comes full circle in Three Peaks later on, shortly after they journey up to a cabin nearer to the peaks, Aaron begins to feel like they've forged a stronger connection. However, when Tristan goes from calling Aaron dad — which in itself weirdly freaks out his mom — to talking to his actual dad nonstop on a cell phone he's given him in secret, we realize that Aaron's breakthrough with the boy is short lived.

Emotions ping-ponging all over the place, though the two have their moments, Tristan acts out, habitually sleeping in their bed to usurp his mom for himself (and kill any chance for romance) before seeing what happens when he grabs Aaron's hand saw and places it across the man's arm.

An unsettling and provocative domestic thriller — hot off the festival circuit — in cinematographer turned writer-director Jan Zabeil's sophomore feature film, he drops us right into the heart of the discomfort to make us an honorary member of this small makeshift family.

Empathizing the most with Aaron, it's through his eyes that we see most of the conversations between Lea and her son as well as Tristan's manipulation of his mother play out. In a critical scene that speaks volumes for its honesty no matter how much it might hurt, Aaron tells the woman he loves that there are moments when he feels so close to Tristan and others where he feels like the boy's suffocating Lea and wishes he that he wasn't there at all.

Needless to say, it's a two way street. And while this sentiment is undoubtedly shared by the boy too young to articulate it in any of the three languages that he speaks, Zabeil also lets it reverberate off of the awesome yet daunting landscape of the Dolomites that — much like a new member of the family — lets you get only so close to it before it pushes you away.

A favorite technique of the filmmaker, Jan Zabeil previously employed nature as a vital backdrop in his acclaimed 2011 debut effort, The River Used to Be a Man. Addressing this in a director's statement in the Peaks press notes, he reveals his love of using the external to symbolize internal emotions and shares his belief that "away from the securities of the civilized world, my characters become less deliberate, more emotionally truthful and are likely to lose control over their actions."

Making the metaphorical link to the environment a dangerously literal one in Peaks, this is precisely what happens in the film's third act when Zabeil moves what had thus far been a domestic drama firmly into nail-biting thriller territory. It's a gamble that works well initially but doesn't quite pay off. While the emotional build-up was always going to erupt, even after Three Peaks takes its first deadly turn (sans hand saw), Zabeil seems hesitant to go along, waiting until the desperate final minutes of the film to fully commit to the new, darkly suspenseful tone.

Nonetheless a highly compelling endeavor, Three Peaks boasts superb cinematography by talented lensman Axel Schneppat and knock-out turns by newcomer Montgomery as Tristan and Fehling as Aaron. Unfortunately, as her character hems and haws and changes her mind almost as much as her young son, it saddles the usually impressive Bérénice Bejo with an underdeveloped role.

Still mostly effective, the work is sure to keep you riveted . . . even if it might just scare you off the next potential mate you meet with kids as, no matter how many times you've lived the first part of this plotline before, trust me, when it comes to Three Peaks, you don't know how this story goes.


Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Dogman (2018)

Now Playing

Undaunted by the sights and sounds of a barking dog snapping his neck forward and baring his fangs in the opening frame, although Marcello (Marcello Fonte) keeps a safe distance at first, once he starts whispering words of encouragement, we quickly realize that this man has never met a dog he couldn't tame.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for humans in Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone's brutal Darwinian western Dogman, which finds the sweet-natured dog groomer Marcello (played by Fonte as a cross between Buster Keaton and Roberto Benigni) struggling to keep a leash on Edoardo Pesce's Simone, a mad-dog ex-boxer turned criminal who terrorizes Marcello's small, sleepy southern Italian town.

Selling cocaine on the side to spoil his beloved daughter with expensive vacations and keep his dog in pasta dinners, Marcello's relationship with Simone grows even more precarious as he plays multiple roles in Marcello's life, including best customer and biggest bully.

A true frenemy running hot and cold on Marcello like one of the alpha dogs that gets dropped off at his workplace, instead of luring him into submission with treats, Marcello uses cocaine, not quite understanding that all it does is make Simone feel more emboldened, barking mad, and invincible.

First cornering the dog groomer to act as a getaway driver in a robbery, soon push comes to shove as Simone puts Marcello in an impossible position, forcing him to choose between loyalty to his fellow business owners (who've openly discussed hiring someone to kill Simone) or letting Simone wreak havoc.

Clinging to the false hope that, having been through a lot together, the two admittedly lonely men in an increasingly cynical world share some sort of codependent bond, the film segues into bleak vengeful western territory midway through.

Fixated on the classic genre paradigm of the weak against the strong (and loosely based on a shocking '80s case), in Dogman, Marcello makes one wrong decision after another until the formerly happy-go-lucky man's smile is long gone.

Steeped in symbolism, it's reminiscent at times of a silent movie or rather two completely different silent features cut together. But factoring in Garrone's complete lack of subtlety, the film's existential Camus inspired conclusion fails to land the way it should, coming as it does after Dogman's far more compelling, character-driven first half.

Still a devastating drama elevated by Fonte's captivating, Cannes Film Festival award-winning performance, while Dogman's overwrought final act never feels fully earned, the film, which was Italy's official submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film is still well worth seeing due to its intriguing blend of classical genres and archetypes that, much like a barking criminal or canine, Dogman nearly tames.


Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement Blu-ray Review: Elena Ferrante on Film - The Days of Abandonment (2005) & Troubling Love (1995)

Now Available



Read Ferrante's Novels

In anticipation of HBO's upcoming miniseries adaptation of Elena Ferrante's internationally bestselling novel, My Brilliant Friend, Film Movement has put together a lavish box set featuring vibrant transfers of the only two films ever adapted from the pseudonymous author's novels as well as a collectible thirty-two page booklet of correspondence, interview excerpts, and lush photos. Curated in reverse chronological order across the two-disc set, I traveled to Ferrante's Naples through my Blu-ray player to learn more.

The Days Of Abandonment (2005) 
AKA: I giorni dell'abbandono

From an eerie opening sequence which informs us that – especially in Roberto Faenza's film – we can't always believe what we see to an early line of dialogue where our protagonist Olga (Margherita Buy) describes the tawdry book she's translating to a friend which serves as a gender flipped foreshadowing of events to come, symbolism is everywhere in this over-the-top adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel.

An initially intriguing spin on Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, among other classic works centered on women whose love lives threaten to be their undoing, shortly into Days the seemingly happily married Olga finds herself in the titular hell of abandonment after her husband announces that he's unhappy and walks out on his wife and two children.

Numbed by disbelief, Olga goes through all five stages of grief before she eventually loses a grip on both reality and her sanity with the discovery that her husband Mario (Inspector Montalbano's Luca Zingaretti) didn't just have an existential crisis but a classic midlife one, trading his educated elegant wife in for an eighteen-year-old he'd already begun molding as her tutor.

As Olga's internal struggles become external, her luck goes from bad to worse. Taking on an allegorical Book of Job like quality, soon phones that connect her to the outside world break and a lizard as well as ants enter to her apartment, which causes her to go to extremes in order to protect her children. Giving in to the depression by staying inside her apartment, eventually things get so out of hand that the home she considers her sanctuary literally traps her inside.

Discarding supporting characters and ideas introduced only moments earlier in favor of increasingly outrageous sequences that must've worked better on the page, Days, which is credited to seven screenwriters on IMDb, reinforces the long-held belief that the internationally beloved, bestselling pseudonymous Italian author’s ouevre is nearly incapable of being adapted successfully.

Embracing wild moments of Magical Realism that distract from the film as a whole, as Olga's growing desperation and near psychosis after being jilted forces her to lash out at Mario and his girlfriend, Days comes across as disturbingly anti-feminist rather than humanist on the screen.

Pulling us in a myriad of directions, as noted in the thirty-two page booklet of letters and interview excerpts included in the double-disc set, out of a handful of characters to focus on, curiously the one in particular that Faenza set out to humanize from his aloof literary incarnation was Mario.

Yes, empathy is always important especially when dealing with an emotionally fraught subject in such a psychologically driven work with shades of Roman Polanski's Repulsion throughout. However, humanizing Mario more than Olga has the (hopefully) unintended side effect of pushing the characters of the husband and wife to even greater extremes by highlighting sexist stereotypes about "hysterical" women and strong men.

And rather than provide a balance between the two personalities, as she chases after her husband in a car or rips the earrings off of Mario's girlfriend in the street, Days transforms Olga into a clichéd Fatal Attraction-esque tormentor victimizing Mario as opposed to a woman sent spiraling after her cold husband ghosted her, when the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Disappointingly, Faenza's identification with the stabilizing male figures continues as Olga begins a tentative relationship with Damian (Goran Bregovic), the supportive musician neighbor who always fancied her but who was forced to keep his distance by an extension of Mario via his loyal dog.

And in spite of what feels like an artificially tacked-on moment of liberation where she finds a little bit of strength in herself before promptly passing out, opting to turn the neighbor into a veritable savior only augments the idea that all an Italian woman needs is a man to snap out of her depression.

Not alone in my belief, and regardless of my enjoyment of Bregovic, in one of the letters to Faenza included in the set, Ferrante urged the director to reconsider this intersection of character, theme, and plot point as well.

The type of film one can imagine would be handled quite differently if it had been written and directed by a woman, while I'm sure the filmmaker's heart was in the right place, despite some real moments of true artistry and outstanding performances within, there's little to recommend the film overall. Better left on the page, sadly had I not been watching Days for review, I would have certainly abandoned Olga as well, which cannot have been what Faenza or Ferrante had in mind.

Troubling Love (1995) 
AKA: L'amore Molesto

Chronologically the first of only two features to be made from Elena Ferrante's books ahead of the HBO miniseries adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, Troubling Love does a much better job of executing the way that women's experiences and trauma are handed down from one generation to the next.

One of the more interesting thematic threads that Roberto Faenza introduced in Days before ultimately abandoning it like his male lead Mario who hoped for something better, Troubling Love's Mario – writer-director Mario Martone – wisely turns the memories of its female characters into an overarching mystery, which begins to unspool prior to the suspicious death of our protagonist's mother.

Having received a series of odd, brief, and seemingly intimate phone calls from her mother just before her body is found in the sea, following the funeral, Anna Bonaiuto's young, reserved comic strip artist Delia leaves her home in Bologna to return to the Naples of her youth.

Flooded with memories of her parents and especially their gifts of creativity – from her father's painting and mother's work as a seamstress – which seem to have been passed down to their daughter, Delia begins to dig deeper once she reaches her hometown and enjoys a literal walk down memory lane.

Grabbing a slice to eat, Delia's Neapolitan reverie is soon interrupted by the predatory, overtly sexual behavior of men aimed her direction while she simply walks down the street (which seems even more disturbing to the eye today). Shot almost like a De Palma horror movie as Delia is followed, Martone puts us into our protagonist's shoes and we become acutely aware of the eyes of every male passerby.

Leaving us wondering if there's a link to her mother Amalia's death or if Martone is alluding to something bigger about Delia herself, both of these ideas come to fruition when our lead comes face-to-face with secrets and lies from her family's past including those she hasn't even begun to face herself.

An exploration of sex and gender roles that could inspire conversation around the globe, as fascinating as it is, Troubling is as narratively troubling as it is tonally inconsistent. And as Delia's mood shifts with each new discovery and interaction, the film strikes a much stronger chord as a psychosexual surrealist mystery a la Eyes Wide Shut than a traditional drama.

Yet whereas Kubrick’s Eyes takes place at night and deals with the unstable bond between husband and wife, save for a creepy, symbolic scene early on when a man comes for her mother's "dirty laundry," Troubling is set largely in the day and deals with the kaleidoscopic memories of guilt and betrayal between mother and daughter.

Trying to send us in another direction altogether, Martone (via Ferrante) throws two supporting male characters into the mix as potential red herrings. And although we inevitably predict the truth about what it is that Delia discovers she's really facing as soon as she steps into a revealing red dress left behind for her as a gift from her mother – the seamstress still dressing her beyond her grave – the disturbing yet fascinating path there makes for compelling viewing.

While those hoping for a conventional mystery or even a typical three act structure are sure to be disappointed (and the film should come with a trigger warning as it's sure to bring up a lot of issues), there's a lot here for viewers to unpack in what seems to be a much more faithful interpretation of Ferrante versus Faenzas's film.

Alluding to that in the extensive, lengthy letters written to Martone by Ferrante included in the set's informative booklet, despite Troubling's overall success when contrasted with Days, both works signal the struggle to successfully bring the author's books to the screen.

Proof of the uneasy disconnect between Ferrante's writing’s heavily internalized structure and the show-me medium of film, although Bonaiuto is outstanding in a difficult and evolving role, just like with Days, we still find ourselves startled by Troubling's freewheeling approach to logic, structure, and of course, gender.

A superior adaptation nonetheless, while it still hits hard today (and doubly so in the era of Me Too and Time's Up), Martone's film will inevitably play differently in its native Italy given the depiction of the tug-of-war between the sexes.

And while I can only hope that the next time someone tries to bring Ferrante'' books to life, it's a woman, in the end I would say that if you're looking for more Ferrante on Film (following My Brilliant Friend), you should pass up Days and stick with Love.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: A Ciambra (2017)

Now Available 

A kinetic slice of neorealistic life, although A Ciambra tells a fully contained coming-of-age story, the sophomore effort from Jonas Carpignano was originally made to serve as a companion piece to his award-winning debut Mediterranea. Fortunately, however, the Cannes Film Festival Director's Fortnight award-winner stands exceptionally tall on its own.

Set in Southern Italy's Gioia Tauro, the film chronicles the life and family of fourteen year old Pio Amato, who stars as a thinly disguised version of himself along with the rest of the cast of unprofessional actors (most of whom are Amato's relatives).

The grandson of a Romani immigrant who lives with his family in extreme poverty stealing electricity from and working for the rich Italians in the surrounding area, as a petty criminal who longs to be taken seriously, Pio can't wait to grow up.

When his father and brother get arrested during a robbery, Pio vows to use the opportunity to become the man of the house and prove them all wrong. Working alongside Ayiva (Koudous Seihon), an older African immigrant who is saving up money to send to his sister and daughter back home, Pio gets to work stealing from tourists.

Boldly climbing aboard trains only to leave moments later with a stranger's luggage, the sight of people freely leaving an area that the young illiterate boy most likely never will is a haunting one indeed and part of A Ciambra's power is in just how long it stays with you after it ends.

A complex portrait of a multicultural southern Italy where racism, bias, and socioeconomic inequality is at an all time high, although Gioia Taura feels like it's a million miles away at the start of the film, by the end, you realize that the issues affecting the residents there (ranging from prejudice to the disparity of rich vs. poor) are the same ones facing us everywhere, only magnified.

Whether Pio's on a train going nowhere or using the guise of a motorbike ride to hug a friend goodbye in a heartbreaking third act twist, as Italy's official Oscar submission for the Best Foreign Film of 2018, Carpignano's moving chronicle of the determined youth's hard-fought journey from boy to man follows in the footsteps of classic Italian and modern global works of Neorealism.

And although Bicycle Thieves and City of God immediately come to mind, the film also owes a thematic debt to other international coming-of-age classics such as Truffaut's The 400 Blows, which A Ciambra appears to reference in a few select shots.

While producer Martin Scorsese offered notes on the film's cut, aside from a minimal nod to Magical Realism while paying tribute to Grandfather Amato's past wandering the land, Carpignano treats Gioia Taura and its people with a near journalistic integrity in A Ciambra, unwilling to alter much of what's in front of his eyes in his attempt to bridge viewer and subject.

Adamant in his belief that, as he says in the press notes, "exposure to 'foreign elements,' whether they be people, food, or music is the only way to dissolve the artificial boundaries between us," in this microcosm of life in Southern Italy which might as well be life everywhere, Carpignano uses film to do just that.

Weaving in a plethora of bonus material from a short film and featurette to lengthy documentaries on the ninety-one day production to bring you the whole story, although it's missing Mediterranea, the gorgeous Blu-ray transfer from MPI and Sundance Selects delivers viewers to Gioia Taura Pio style - with no train ticket required.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement Blu-ray Review: The Great Silence (1968)

Now Available 

Giving new meaning to the phrase “close but no cigar,” word is that when Twentieth Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck reached the end of Sergio Corbucci's darkly subversive 1968 Spaghetti Western The Great Silence, he was rendered so speechless by the film's bleak ending that he swallowed the cigar he'd been smoking in absolute shock.

Unwilling to distribute the stark, anti-authoritarian picture in the United States (even after Corbucci was asked to shoot two new thankfully unused conclusions), Zanuck relegated Silence to a foreign release. And Corbucci's film did fairly well everywhere but its native Italy where – like Zanuck – one Sicilian viewer was so upset by the final showdown that he fired his gun in anger directly at the movie screen.

A revisionist take on the genre's classic Shane style paradigm wherein good triumphs over evil once a polite cowboy rides into town and sets things right, in Silence, A Man and a Woman actor Jean-Louis Trintignant saddles up for duty as the film's mute gunfighter-for-hire title lead.

Newly arrived in Snow Hill, Utah, Trintignant's Silence finds himself quickly caught up in a two-sided conflict. Turning the convention of "bad" outlaws and "good" bounty hunters on its head, in The Great Silence, the turf war is between a group of outlaws – many of whom committed petty crimes in order to give their loved ones something to eat – and the "bounty killers" who make a living getting away with murder plus a reward by gaming the system of killing in the name of (forced) self defense.

The brutality of the film's bounty killers led by Klaus Kinski's sadistic Loco (whose character was partly inspired by Boris Karloff's vampire in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath), as well as its message of political and judicial corruption are apparent right from the start of what Repo Man filmmaker and knowledgeable genre scholar Alex Cox has dubbed "the most pessimistic western of all time."

Reflecting the off-screen violence of 1968 – and the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X in particular – by subverting the genre that he treasured but had recently felt growing stale as a storyteller, Corbucci set out to make his own snowy homage to John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn and Andre DeToth's Day of the Outlaw.

Filmed in the Italian Dolomites as opposed to the traditional Spaghetti locale of Spain, Corbucci's opus opens with a sea of white as far as the eye can see. Augmented by twenty-six tons of shaving cream, the snowy visual scope not only matches Silence's melancholic tone but, contrasted by its dark sets and costumes, it punctuates the film's bursts of red blood and black gunfire that much more.

And similar to the way that a memorable match cut of a flame is employed to take us from the present to a flashback – from Ennio Morricone's simpler and relatively downbeat score to the brutal (and occasionally blurry) beauty of Silvano Ippoliti's cinematography – everything in Silence foreshadows the eventual literal and metaphorical darkness to come.

Worthy of endless analysis from political to religious to Freudian to moral, the revolutionary work makes brilliant use of a genre that lends itself so well to subtext.

Breaking new ground, although relatively chaste, Silence notably features Corbucci's one and only love scene. Serving as a powerful step in the right direction in terms of gender and racial equality, not only is the romantic moment initiated by its female lead (after she's given a firm no to someone else) but by featuring a white actor and black actress in the form of Trintignant and talented newcomer Vonetta McGee it's also interracial in nature. And although Corbucci had no interest in filming another, by using love instead of war, Silence's brief moment of tenderness might've broken down walls that violence wouldn't breach in movies to come.

For decades only a cult film here in the United States, now thanks to Film Movement, The Great Silence has at last been given a gorgeous 2k restoration and theatrical release in time for its fiftieth anniversary. As loaded with bonus features as Corbucci's film is with symbolism, the brand new Blu-ray and DVD editions of Silence boast a terrific essay from film critic Simon Abrams, the two unused alternate endings, a commentary featurette with Alex Cox, as well as the 1988 Spaghetti Western documentary Westerns, Italian Style and more, although the main draw remains the film itself.

Visually reminiscent of Robert Altman's own subversive 1971 western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Great Silence also served as a major influence on Quentin Tarantino's work. Yet despite the fact that Corbucci paid homage to multiple films in just as many genres, in terms of how to make a Spaghetti Western set in the late 1800s relevant to those in the late 1960s, in the end, Corbucci was far more inspired by events playing out in the news than he was by art.

A fascinating watch, now with the Trump Administration working to game the system, escape justice, and dial us back to Old West era laws, eerily some of the political arguments and warnings in Corbucci's classic have become timelier than ever. Just like the flame in the film that flicks us from present to past, The Great Silence shows us that although things have changed, when it comes to where we ultimately want to be as a country, we're still close but no cigar. Yet even though it holds up a startling mirror to society, maybe instead of feeling defeated by the ending, we can just worry about right now and keep fighting for what's right.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement DVD Review: Salvo (2013) and Rita (2009)

Now Available to Own   

  Photo Slideshow   

Addressing the stifling heat wave and resulting power outages currently oppressing the residents of Sicily, a male radio announcer exclaims that "there is no end to this hell in Palermo."

However when you consider that the line is heard early on in Salvo, you're quick to discover after only the first act that he might just as well have been setting the stage for and/or predicting the narrative effectiveness of this unusual crime film from Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza.

Initially it begins as a noble experiment to infuse the symbolic arthouse picture with a cross between Spaghetti Westerns and hardboiled Film Noir. However, Salvo takes what should have been an exciting premise about a hitman who comes face to face with his own humanity after he crosses paths with a blind girl (in what seems like a thematic and topical homage to director John Woo's contemporary classic The Killer) and squanders it on delusions of pretentious grandeur.

An Italian/French co-production, Salvo nonetheless did well during France's Cannes Film Festival where it took home a Visionary Award and the Critic's Week Prize.

Yet while the attention to sensory detail is a highpoint given the heightened ambient sound design from Michael Haneke's talented collaborator and some jaw-droppingly long tracking shots that seem to go on forever, all of the impressive techniques in the world can't hide the fact that despite its expressionistic beauty, Salvo has little (if anything) compelling to say.

A meditation on loneliness, Salvo forces its clunky symbolism of the literal and metaphorical "I once was blind but now can see" variety down our throat from start to finish.

Unfortunately, without any storytelling logic nor rhyme, reason or understanding of our characters to balance it out or make the over-the-top plot twist (in a largely plot-free movie) believable, ironically in the end it's mostly the viewers of Salvo who've been left in the dark.

Newly released on DVD from Film Movement, Salvo's disc features not only interviews with the writer/directors but also the 2009 short film companion Rita to this 2013 feature.

Focusing on the same core ingredients but shot with a greater emphasis on the (now younger) blind female character's point-of-view, Rita comes across both creepier and less sympathetically in its depiction of a girl who bonds with the man who just murdered her relatives.

Although the feature's treatment of this is handled with more poignancy and poetry to varying degrees of success, Salvo goes nowhere fast by offering us little insight or explanation to the who, what, where, when, why or how of what is otherwise a largely silent film.

More concerned with atmosphere and ambience as well as an art school student's devotion to symbolism and allegory, Salvo couldn't be less subtle if it were filmed in black and white, featured a Greek chorus, and/or a scene where its characters played chess with death.

Although their creativity is undeniable – in order to make vastly superior films and avoid the endless hell alluded to at the start of the movie – Grassadonia and Piazza would be better off relying on another to take their ideas and transform them into a screenplay that's well worth the time, expense, and effort of being brought to either short or full length cinematic life.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review: L'eclisse (1962)

Now Available to Own   

 

Alternate Titles: L'Eclisse; The Eclipse

A film about alienation and the fleeting nature of relationships in director Michelangelo Antonioni’s then contemporary surroundings of Italy in the early 1960s — whether it’s by way of barriers, borders, or character blocking — from the moment L’eclisse begins its characters barely connect on any level.

In fact from its opening sequence which depicts the end of what we perceive to be a long relationship, as the film’s restless heroine (and stand-in for Antonioni) played by Monica Vitti breaks up with her older lover, the two characters are placed in a room only a few feet apart and they can’t bear to look one another in the eye.

In our current era of strict filmic adherence to eye-levels and matched continuity where people view confrontations on the big screen yet avoid the same experience by hiding behind the small screens of their smartphones which are frequently used to end relationships or mask emotion, this messiness — both cinematically as well as interpersonally — is hard for viewers to handle.

Stylistically self-conscious, admittedly stagy, and absolutely unorthodox, the way their eyes fail to hold one another’s gaze made me actually wonder at first glance whether the male character (played by Francisco Rabal) was supposed to blind.

While metaphorically that is likely true, Antonioni is quick to correct this false assumption. He directs Rabal to stand up and walk directly over to Vitti, whom his character later follows home like a lost puppy, uncertain how to dissolve their relationship which by that point had become little more than routine.

A curious decision on Antonioni’s part, the fact that L’eclisse made me question Rabal's sight (even for a split second) actually speaks to the much larger theme of the work which is that in all actuality we don’t really “see” each other.

Whether this is due to apathy, existential angst, a form of self-preservation, or something different altogether is open to interpretation, yet the idea that even when we do use our eyes we never really know what’s going on floats through Antonioni’s work of this period.

Beginning with his most overt exploration of the theme in 1960's L’Avventura, the characters in Antonioni’s cinema are far removed from one another on a number of levels.

This is evidenced in the search for the missing woman in L’Avventura, emotionally in 1961's La Notte and repeatedly in the trilogy as characters are cut off by barriers again and again.

The recurring use of barriers has a much larger meaning as Antonioni's frames employ architectural alienation to create a symbiotic relationship between our immediate environment (namely, an urban landscape) that also ties in with the one we have with one another on a human level.

He takes this idea to its furthest point in L’eclisse, by not only using the techniques and motifs he’d touched upon previously in a stronger way but also adding another layer of ambiguity to the mix.

Gone With the Wind may have been released decades earlier and the song “She’s Like the Wind” wouldn’t be written for a few more decades but in his ’62 film, Antonioni likens the fickle nature of its characters to the wind by making it yet another sensory motif to suggest that we can see each other about as well as we can see the wind.

The lovers in L’eclisse blow through one another’s lives like the fan that’s used at the beginning of the picture and the breeze that comes through the frame and blows the papers near the end of the film after Vitti has tentatively started — and just as quickly stopped — and walked away from yet another relationship.

With characters who would rather kiss "Between the Bars" (again decades before the Elliott Smith song spun this idea into a new direction) or through the use of glass to add a new reflection or layer of reality than the one they're experiencing together, it seems as if the two are only pulled together by the force of their surroundings.

For as soon as they get enough space in between them, the lovers in an Antonioni film are engulfed, overpowered, and therefore threatened to drift apart because there's nothing "real" or metaphorically concrete holding them together than the literal reality of walls or buildings made of concrete.

The third in a thematic trilogy, Antonioni's work is centered on “Eros, art, business, and emotional alienation in the contemporary world,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in his Criterion essay of the film. L’eclisse explored the filmmaker’s “preoccupation with objects and places overtaking and supplanting people” as Vitti falls into a mismatched meandering romance with Alain Delon’s stockbroker that seems doomed from the start.

It's another “modernist mystery story” that gives Vitti a chance to play a sort of “detective figure” investigating Antonioni’s “troubled inquiries into the shifting appearances of our reality” as Gilberto Perez wrote in his Criterion essay analyzing the director’s collaborations with Vitti. And while L’eclisse is perhaps the most artistically audacious of the three titles, its influence on future generations of filmmakers cannot be understated.

A favorite of Martin Scorsese, who most assuredly would’ve been intrigued by the way that men and women seem to speak two different languages in one of Antonioni's quietest and perhaps most Jacques Tati-like and likewise silent film inspired efforts, there’s a bit of L’eclisse in After Hours as well as Raging Bull, The Aviator, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Likewise, given the repetition of past locations and the way that previous frames are now charged with meaning when repeated, its experimentally allegorical, poetic and symbolism-drenched ending (which some U.S. distributors actually removed from the film reel because it left out its protagonists completely), L'eclisse has a hypnotic undercurrent we’ve seen throughout the filmography of Wong Kar-wai and Sofia Coppola.

Featuring one of the best and most informative booklets I’ve seen included in a Criterion set in months, this gorgeous restoration and Blu-ray transfer plays particularly well after not only the previous two Antonioni films in the trilogy that captured his thoughts at a certain time and place, but also when viewed with one of the many films it inspired.

Watching it juxtaposed with unexpected titles adds extra layers to the original work while also helping you better appreciate the impact that a film about two people who could barely see one another (let alone their true selves) had on changing the way we saw narrative cinema forever.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.