07/09/2011

There was a cold reaction from industry insiders, sometimes accompanied by laughter, to the more dramatic scenes in the second Italian film in Competition at the Venice Film Festival, Quando la notte [+see also:
trailer
making of
film profile] by Cristina Comencini.

Based on a novel by the director herself, the film deals with the subject of motherhood, of the contrasting feelings towards one’s own child and of a couple’s relationship when children are still young.

Marina, played by Claudia Pandolfi arrives at a mountain location to spend a month’s holiday with her two-year-old son, Marco. The house in which she is staying belongs to mountain guide Manfred (Filippo Timi), who's a solitary man. Little Marco cries a lot and Marina becomes increasingly exasperated, then one night a domestic accident occurs, which Manfred interprets as being an act of violence on the part of the mother towards her son. The confrontation between the man and his guest will open up recent as well as old wounds, bringing the two irrevocably together. Marina has a demanding husband who does not support her in the difficult task of motherhood and Manfred was abandoned by his own mother, who fled with a stranger, leaving him and his brothers alone with his father.

Used to investigating the grey areas of family life, especially with Don’t Tell [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2005), Cristina Comencini begins the film as though it were a thriller, before transforming it into a love drama which in one scene even quotes Doctor Zivago. The vertiginous valleys of the Monte Rosa present a stage on which two solitudes come up against each other, sniff and then attract. However, certain narrative choices and dialogue do not quite sustain the emotional tension, and Timi, wonderful actor in quivering drama though he is, escapes the director’s control.

(Translated from Italian)