12/08/2024 - The second film by directing duo Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino stars a wondrous Marianna Fontana as a young woman sublimating the loss of her father

This is the Italian South, but not the way you’re used to seeing it: a grey winter in a small industrial town and a steel-coloured sea you prefer to stay away from. There, we meet a girl in her early twenties (Marianna Fontana) who remains nameless throughout Luce [+see also:
trailer
interview: Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino
film profile], the new film by writer-director duo Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino which world-premiered in the Locarno Film Festival’s International Competition. A brunette who lives alone and is often told to smile more, the film’s beguiling protagonist seems like the kind of girl who doesn’t keep secrets. And yet, she does: she smuggles a flip phone into a prison with the hope that her father will call her from it.

If you expect a traditional three-act narrative structure and standard character development from Luce, you might have come to the wrong place. Judging by Crater [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Silvia Luzi, Luca Bellino
film profile] (2017 Venice Film Festival), Luzi and Bellino have a sensitive and generous approach to storytelling: they let emotions lead. Even when the feelings of their protagonist are largely illegible, like in Luce, the writer-directors know how to channel vulnerability in an empathetic way. Thanks to the clever script, the film never tips into excessive sentimentality when showing a daughter’s relationship to her absent father solely through phone conversations, but it’s the lead that makes it all take flight. 

Marianna Fontana is someone who by age 20 already had not one, but two nominations for a David di Donatello Acting Award, for her first two roles in Indivisible [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Edoardo de Angelis
film profile] (2016) and Capri-Revolution [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mario Martone
film profile] (2018). Her command of the screen is exceptional; her face is a canvas for a narrow spectrum of emotions that nevertheless cut deep every time she is about to lock eyes with the camera. Yet, she almost never does: an eye-line match would be too easy a move and her character is not someone who asserts themselves so directly. This nameless young girl gets up at 5 o’clock every morning, works the assembly line at a leather factory, and soaks her sore hands in ice water every night. When the phone rings, she speaks to a father she barely knew. Whether it’s all real or imaginary does not matter.

Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino have hit the jackpot with Fontana—not least since her dedication to this role involved working in a leather factory, incognito, for three months—and their sensibilities translated into visual terms make every sequence shine with a light of its own. Luce is not necessarily a bright film, nor a particularly upbeat one, but there is so much humanity at the heart of it all. Work, longing, and loneliness are present here as a triad that may trap you, but the film also makes it clear that there is always a way out, either literal or imaginary.

Luce is an Italian production by Bokeh Film and Stemal Entertainment with Rai Cinema. Fandango Sales handles the film's world sales.