19/03/2025 - The debut film by Sara Petraglia, about two gay and drug addicted friends, has an ambitious and brilliant style that defuses dramatic themes without ever really going deep

L’albero, directed by Sara Petraglia, is a cinematic debut that aims high, with undeniable ambitions, not all satisfied, yet with an authentic momentum. The film’s dynamic and brilliant style, in Italian cinemas on 20 March through Fandango Distribuzione, manages to defuse dramatic themes with lightheartedness.

Bianca (Tecla Insolia) and Angelica (Carlotta Gamba) are two friends in their 20s, university students, who go live together in a once-popular and now highly sought after neighbourhood of Rome. The cost of rent doesn’t seem to be a problem for them, which is how we understand that they come from well-off families. They are both lesbians, they frequent the LGBTQ+ community, and they have ups and downs (Angelica has a girlfriend in Milan whom she should soon join) and we immediately discern a certain erotic tension from Bianca towards her friend. Angelica is girlish, tender and unpredictable, while Bianca is more intellectual and romantic, has an almost Pasolinian curiosity towards people, and is working on three books at once, about love, friendship and cocaine – and the latter subject has a rather preponderant role in both of their lives. Bianca and Angelica are in fact consumers of MDMA, ketamine and other pills, but above all – and with daddy’s money – cocaine. They have developed a dependency that they can’t even admit to themselves. 

When the situation gets difficult, the two of them go to Naples to detox (“what a drag the sea is, we are for the darkness”, says Bianca), a difficult thing to do if you become friends with all the drug dealers in the neighbourhood. Having hit rock bottom (meaning sniffing acrylic paint knowing it is acrylic paint), Bianca has a vision of Angelica (as her name suggests) with great white wings and kisses her on the couch. A sentimental turning point in their relationship or a good reason for Angelica to disappear? L’albero isn’t Requiem for a Dream or Trainspotting: back in Rome, Bianca decides to enter a SerT (the health service for drug addicts) and confesses to the psychologist that she misses Angelica, “the instability, the vertigo, not feeling the ground under my feet”.

Sara Petraglia, a daughter of art (her father Sandro is one of the most prestigious Italian screenwriters) and known for her experience as a photographer, has made a film about love, growth and youth relationships that doesn’t look for eccentricity at any cost, but which fascinates by its researched and never banal directorial approach, when compared to other debuts by filmmakers of her generation. There’s a certain ability to pillory the self-referential and empty bourgeois environment, even if certain themes, such as homosexuality, have lately been overused in cinema and the exploration of youth dynamics never really goes deep. For Tecla Insolia (who has proven to be a promising figure in Italian cinema with Familia [+see also:
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L’albero was produced by Bibi Film.

(Translated from Italian)