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Dec 18,2005 - Dec 25,2005 |
Italians shine at the Venice Film Festival
Family dysfunction at centre of films by Avati, Comencini and Faenza
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2005-08-28
For the 62nd edition of the Venice Film Festival, festival director Marco Muller has been boasting about its Hollywood-friendly line-up. But it's the Italians that take centre-stage this year, as they should considering this is the country's most prestigious and oldest event of its kind.
In the competition section of the festival there are no less than six Italian films, including several co-productions. Pupi Avati's La Seconda Notte di Nozze stars Neri Marore, Antonio Albanese and Katia Ricciarelli in a story set during 1945 where a woman, Liliana, and her son, Nino, steal a car and drive towards Puglia where she hopes to hook up with her brother-in-law whom she loved when they were young.
"The strange couple formed by Liliana and Nino, the scatterbrained son, is tied to memories of my adolescence," explains Avati. "My mother was widowed quite young, and she was an attractive woman and her friends, afraid that she would give in to solitude, forced her to meet other men. She accepted to go on some dates, and often she'd bring me along. I remember some funny moments, like one where the guy was a dentist who was obviously gay."
Another film in competition is Cristina Comencini's La Bestia nel Cuore, which stars Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Sabina, a beautiful woman with a great job and man she loves. But lately she's been troubled by constant nightmares, and when she discovers she's pregnant her mind opens up to memories of a strict childhood that have hidden dark secrets. The film is based on Comencini's novel of the same name.
The third all-Italian film in competition is Roberto Faenza's I Giorni dell'abbandono starring Margherita Buy and Luca Zingaretti. Olga, a still young woman, tranquil and satisfied, is all of a sudden abandoned by her husband and falls into a bottomless vortex. The days of abandonment are the endless hours of losses, inflicted and suffered, the times of hard emotions and feelings that devastate her, of the love sickness that suffocates her. In the end everything is revealed and finally the nightmare starts to go away: Olga has not risked going insane for love of her husband, but because she has experienced by herself what the sense of love really is. Now that she knows its cost, she knows how to face it. From the Elena Ferrante novel by the same name.
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