Dir: Luca Bellini, Silvia Luzi | Italy Drama 92’
Episodes from the life of Luce an aimless young woman living in Rome is the latest feature from director duo Luca Bellini and Silvio Luzzi.
Partly told in Roman dialect the drama unfolds in bleak winter in a cold and rainy Southern Italy: One day on the beach, Luce has a sudden inspiration, and from that moment on her life also becomes someone else’s. A voice on her cellphone provides a tenuous line between her desires, her imagination, and the world around her.
Luce is disillusioned by love and life in general. By day she works in a noisy leather factory – and this is film that is incredibly noisy with its jarring score – by night she hangs out with an unreliable photographer in a relationship that’s heading nowhere. The women in her life are mostly unsupportive and tell her not to take life so seriously. So much for the sisterhood.
But one day on the beach she gets an idea in her head and becomes obsessed by it. Then come the anonymous phone calls from a man claiming to be her father. This disembodied stranger offers comfort and stability and the intimacy she has been missing. But is this just another man to let her down, or is it her real father?. Fact and fantasy meld and mesmerise us in this fuzzy reverie.
Essentially a one-hander with close up and personal camerawork from Jacopo Caramella and driven forward by its antsy atmosphere we really gets inside Luce’s world and experience what it’s like to be a downcast twenty something: confused, depressed and lonely. Marianna Fontana gives a soulful and sensitive interpretation of Luce in this intimate and refreshingly novel portrait of modern womanhood untethered by kids, companionship and close caring family. @MeredithTaylor
LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024