17/10/2024 - Christina Vandekerckhove offers up a soul-stirring duo composed of a teenager with impaired hearing and his father who sometimes struggles with the situation

Film Fest Gent has unveiled a premiere of Milano [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Flemish director Christina Vandekerckhove’s first fiction feature, in a special screening. Working in both theatre and TV, the director first turned heads in 2017 with her documentary Rabot [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which chiefly won her the Audience Award at Film Fest Gent, as well as the Ensor for Best Documentary.

In Milano, she explores the complex relationship between a father and his son. Milano (Basil Wheatley) has just become a teenager. He has impaired hearing and seems to live in his own little world, partially cut off from others and especially from his father, Alain (Matteo Simoni). There’s no doubt of the love that unites them, but there’s definitely a distance between them. This distance might have something to do with an absence, that of Milano’s mother, a lost, young woman who ran away from parenthood when her son was only tiny. Alain, for his part, slaves away to make ends meet, taking on all kinds of odd jobs, determined that his son will have a better life than he did, often to the point of working himself to death.

But it’s not always enough to want to escape our environment. In search of a mother figure he just can’t find, Milano takes refuge with Renée (Alexia Depicker), a single forty-something without children who’s rich in money but poor in love, and who sees in this young man a way to bring warmth to a day-to-day life characterised by loneliness.

Outside, the various elements rumble and the storm rises as the drama gains momentum. Where can we find resilience in the face of such trauma? How can Milano be convinced to move beyond the mutism which he’s imposed upon himself, and which is driving his powerless father crazy? The story distils dramatic elements (drug smuggling, a cruel young neighbour, a little dog with whom Milano finds comfort) which lend a glimpse of the fatality at work. The character of Renée - whose relationship with Milano and his father and how it came about is never actually clarified - illustrates in a slightly exaggerated fashion the class fate which seems to condemn Milano in advance, and the contrast between the boy and his environment flirts with miserabilism.

What is memorable, however, is the beautiful portrait the film paints of Milano, and the way it allows us into his sensory universe through the on-screen representation of his deafness by way of sound design which captures the boy’s truth in scenes when he removes the filter of his hearing aids. We’ll also remember the wonderful performance of young Basil Wheatley, in his first film, flanked effectively by Matteo Simoni, who’s always on the money, and by Alexia Depicker, who’s also convincing, all three of them lending substance to their relationships, despite the slightly stereotypical nature of the social class differences driving them apart.

Milano was produced by Lunanime (Belgium) in co-production with Bastide Films (Netherlands) and Dragons Films (Belgium), while international sales are entrusted to Best Friend Forever. The movie will be released in Belgium on 6 November, courtesy of Lumière. 

(Translated from French)