13/08/2024 - The rich and conformist northeast of Italy forms the backdrop to Marco Tullio Giordana’s dramatic story about prejudice and family ambiguities redeemed by musical talent

A hidden life lived alone, because hypocrisy and prejudice don’t spare anyone who’s different: they marginalise them. And so redemption comes through art, through a “monstrous” level of talent, though wounds may never heal. Marco Tullio Giordana has taken inspiration from Mariapia Veladiano’s successful 2010 novel of the same name for his new film, The Life Apart [+see also:
trailer
interview: Marco Tullio Giordana
film profile], which was presented in a premiere out of competition in the Locarno Film Festival. Giordana, who won Locarno’s Golden Leopard for his first work To Love The Damned, has now received a Special Lifetime Achievement Leopard.

It was Marco Bellocchio who entrusted Giordana with this project (and its production), the screenplay for which he and Gloria Malatesta wrote an initial version of, before throwing in the towel ten or so years ago. The story is set in the ‘80s and ‘90s in the rich and conformist city of Vicenza. We enter an elegant residence overlooking the river and belonging to an upper-class family. Osvaldo (Paolo Pierobon), a highly esteemed doctor in the city, is married to Maria (Valentina Bellé), who is showing all the signs of serious depression, which has been heightened by her struggles to have children. She does eventually become pregnant, and she brings Rebecca into the world, but the newborn has an unsightly red mark on her face which leads her mother to reject her. Maria can’t even take her own baby into her arms, and she becomes increasingly isolated. Rebecca (Sara Ciocca at 10-12 years old; Beatrice Barison at 17-22) grows up in a gilded cage, deprived of affection (“it’s possible to love and reject someone at the same time”), protected from wagging tongues by her father’s twin sister, Aunt Erminia (Sonia Bergamasco), and with only one friend to speak of: extroverted Lucilla. But when she sneaks into her aunt’s piano room, Rebecca soon reveals a great talent for music. Erminia, herself a refined concert pianist, becomes her niece’s teacher and, as Rebecca’s mother slips away, the young woman finds her very own way to express herself and to step out into the world unafraid, all the while entrusting her questions over her tormented family’s secrets to her diary.

Bellocchio’s writing can definitely be gleaned in some of the film’s dramatic emphases, notably the obsession with family relations and the hypocrisies of religion. But Giordano’s adaptation of the text “adjusts” the movie’s approach to explore the body, human weakness and the impossibility of communicating via a film about things unsaid, which is why the choice and direction of the cast was so crucial. The Milanese director, who has always established deep bonds with his actors on set, has once again called upon Sonia Bergamasco, twenty years on from his masterpiece, The Best of Youth [+see also:
trailer
film profile], in which he asked her to play a pianist and independent woman who rejects a life full of traditions. The only male character is entrusted to Paolo Pierobon, who plays an unfathomable, imploding man. Giordana directs Valentina Bellé through her obsessions, her loneliness, her feelings of being left out of the exclusive relationship between her husband and his sister. Last but not least, the young and talented international concert pianist Beatrice Barison is stepping in front of the cameras for the very first time, proving she can step into the shoes of our young protagonist with ease. And the director’s collaboration with composer Dario Marianelli, who won the Oscar for Best Score in 2008 for Atonement [+see also:
trailer
film profile], proves just how important music is to the film’s equilibrium.

The Life Apart was produced by Kavac Films, IBC Movie and One Art together with RAI Cinema, while international sales fall to Intramovies.

(Translated from Italian)