Dir: Peter Kerekes | Cast: Erica Barbiani, Lucia Candelpergher, Peter Kerekes, Vic Schmarc, Ralph Wieser, Vanja Jambrovic, Stefano Centini, Peter Kerekes | Drama 98′
Wishing on a Star received its world premiere in the Horizons strand of the 81st Venice Film Festival and is a quiet, gentle film that feels like a small unassuming drama doc, unafraid to tackle big themes of life.
While there is, strictly speaking, no clear narrative, the film offers a visual tapestry intercutting between stories of a gallery of players. Often cut together over a period of time and in some cases without finding out what happens next, several stories are left for the viewer to imagine resolutions. With references to astrology, the film provides viewers with questions as to whether we are the architects of our lives or simply life’s travelling players.
The film was co-written by the filmmaker with Erica Barbiani and focuses on stories about the search for love, relationships and re-birth with a number of sequences that hit home with more power than others. One character is a Neapolitan astrology therapist who invites people to imagine they are in foreign countries without actually travelling. Another character is a funeral director who inherited the family business, never found time to find a partner and still lives with his Italian mother who nags him to settle down. He decides to interview a group of women and chooses one to run the business while he is on holiday with Kerekes filming a meal for three seated around a table with deeply felt unspoken tension.
One of the most moving sequences involves a gentle older woman who has devoted her life to her mother. Now finally free, she embarks on a journey that will find her, by chance, swimming in a forbidden lake. Arrested by authorities, her action feels like a liberating sense of civil disobedience of a type never before experienced. Disappointment with life is not far away for some of the players and Kerekes is fascinated by twins, introducing at one point a surreal visual chessboard of multiple sets of twins.
The pace of Wishing on a Star may be too slow or languid for some and feels aimed at mature viewers willing to adapt to a pace and flow far away from the rapid style of current digital filmmaking. The spiritual mentor of the film could be Federico Fellini in his early documentary- flavoured period reinforced by the sounds of a Nino Rota inspired soundtrack complimenting a mosaic of ordinary characters made unique by the power of chance and imagination.
Wishing on a Star is Kerekes’ first feature length film that draws upon a background as a documentary filmmaker of short films which enables the Slovakian director to capture a sense of – often comic – dramatic fiction out of the beautifully observed natural movements and rhythms of ordinary people. There are also several expertly sustained long takes often filmed from mid-range viewpoints. The film is an accomplished production involving Italy, Lebanon, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Croatia with a flyaway sequence to Taiwan that looks and feels like a kind of European funded co-production without involving the UK in this post Brexit era.
PETER HERBERT / CURATOR MANAGER THE ARTS PROJECT
www.facebook.com/theartsproject1
https://www.instagram.com/theartsprojectlondon/
Tweets by ArtsProjectLdn