FILMS / REVIEWS Germany / Italy
Review: Paternal Leave
- Alissa Jung’s debut film sidesteps rhetoric but is too hesitant when exploring the relationship between a teenage girl and the father she never knew, played by Luca Marinelli
Paolo (Luca Marinelli) is a forty-year-old surfing instructor who’s in charge of a lido on the Adriatic coast. At the height of winter, a fifteen-year-old German girl called Leona, who goes by the name of Leo (Berlin-based newcomer Juli Grabenhenrich), erupts into his life. The teen has run away from home after finding a YouTube video of her father who she’d never met and who her mother had hidden from her. But now she has an address in Italy… And now she’s faced with an embarrassed and reluctant dad. Presented in the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section (having won a prize at the AG Kino Gilde Awards for experimental films) and recently screened in the Bellaria Film Festival, the German-Italian co-production Paternal Leave [+see also:
interview: Alissa Jung
film profile] is hitting Italian cinemas on 15 May, distributed by Vision Distribution. It marks the directorial debut of Alissa Jung, who’s mostly known to German audiences as a successful TV actress, and as Marinelli’s wife.
“I have lots of questions but I don’t know if I want to know the answers”. Pugnacious and tenacious Leo is met with a wall of hesitation and fear. Caught off-guard, her father reacts by hiding his head in the sand. But Paolo does have a daughter (Joy Falletti Cardillo) with his ex, Valeria (Gaia Rinaldi), whom he looks after with great care and affection. Leo observes him and her anger increases, feeling excluded by a man who failed to take responsibility following his summer fling with her young German mum. “We were young, I was paralysed”, he shouts at her. “I don’t want to make the same mistake. I have to look after them”.
There are moments when the father and daughter grow closer, communicating non-verbally - such as the scene where they’re surfing on the frozen sea or when they’re watching the flamingo colonies which populate the Po Delta – but also sudden angry outbursts from both of them, which Austrian director of photography Carolina Steinbrecher captures brilliantly through sudden angular close-ups on Juli Grabenhenrich’s face, set against the backdrop of the dunes on the winter beach or Comacchio’s salt marshes and swamps - a poetic oasis for pink flamingos. Here, the protagonist of the recent series Mussolini: Son of the Century [+see also:
interview: Joe Wright
series profile] laconically expresses the full fragility of her generation and of a modern father who’s incapable of stepping up to the plate. Unfortunately, confrontations and clashes continue throughout the film without any real narrative development. There’s another inadequate father in this story, whom we only know of through the words of a local boy (Arturo Gabbriellini) who becomes Leo’s friend. Trying to work out his sexual identity, Edoardo also struggles to establish any kind of father-son relationship, proven by the black eye his father has treated him to, out of terror that his son might be gay.
There’s no rhetoric in this sad story of family reckoning, but the handful of powerful metaphors gracing the film – such as the flamingos, animals who embrace cooperative parenting – don’t really help the director’s attempt to explore either the consciousness of fatherhood and affective decisions, or Leo’s impulsive, visceral and furious effort to fill the emotional and identity-based hole left by her father’s absence.
Paternal Leave was produced by The Match Factory (who are also selling the film abroad) and Wildside (of the Fremantle Group), in collaboration with Vision Distribution, RAI Cinema and Sky.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 16/02/2025: Berlinale 2025 - Paternal Leave
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