Country: IT/FR/SW/TUR
Technical: col 131m
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Cast: Josh O'Connor, Carol Duarte, Isabella Rossellini, Alice Rohrwacher
Synopsis:
An Englishman, who has been imprisoned for grave-robbing archaeological sites, returns to Tuscany to visit his ex-girlfriend's mother, and there resumes his tomb-raiding activities, thanks to his uncanny divining ability and visionary seizures.
Review:
The director continues her trilogy of films exploring our relationship with the past. The inherent dilemma of archaeology, that we cannot see without irrevocably altering what we find, is touched upon obliquely early on as a tomb is opened and the air rushes in, as with an ancient bottle of wine. The hero ultimately becomes attuned to this as he is forced to decapitate a statue in order to retrieve it, which he then indentifies with his former lover. Other characters are instead shocked by the sacrilegious aspects, while big money traffickers circle overhead. The film's impact is diminished by its lengthy and diffuse narrative, however, by the number of characters and the vagueness of their relationships with each other, and by the fact that magic realist sequences are filmed with the same discourse of realism as all the rest.
Country: IT/FR/SW/TUR
Technical: col 131m
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Cast: Josh O'Connor, Carol Duarte, Isabella Rossellini, Alice Rohrwacher
Synopsis:
An Englishman, who has been imprisoned for grave-robbing archaeological sites, returns to Tuscany to visit his ex-girlfriend's mother, and there resumes his tomb-raiding activities, thanks to his uncanny divining ability and visionary seizures.
Review:
The director continues her trilogy of films exploring our relationship with the past. The inherent dilemma of archaeology, that we cannot see without irrevocably altering what we find, is touched upon obliquely early on as a tomb is opened and the air rushes in, as with an ancient bottle of wine. The hero ultimately becomes attuned to this as he is forced to decapitate a statue in order to retrieve it, which he then indentifies with his former lover. Other characters are instead shocked by the sacrilegious aspects, while big money traffickers circle overhead. The film's impact is diminished by its lengthy and diffuse narrative, however, by the number of characters and the vagueness of their relationships with each other, and by the fact that magic realist sequences are filmed with the same discourse of realism as all the rest.
