Film reviews: Michelangelo and broken marriage at the Italian Film Festival
Sin paints a nontraditional portrait of the artist, while The Ties reveals the fractures in a family in Naples
In the vividly shot Sin, Alberto Testone plays a tormented, and bath-averse, Michelangelo.
VIFF, Il Centro-Italian Cultural Centre, and the Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver present the Italian Film Festival from January 8 to 21
THE ITALIAN FILM Festival is bringing Renaissance Florence and contemporary Naples to your living room in an atmospheric series of movies that stream January 8 to 21.
Amid the offerings, director Andrei Konchalovsky’s Sin journeys back to the evocative 16th-century settings of Tuscany, Piemonte, and Rome. But he refuses to romanticize his subject Michelangelo in the strikingly shot artist biopic.
The genius behind the Sistine Chapel and David was known to be a sad loner who lived in squalor. In this Italian-Russian coproduction, actor Alberto Testone plays him as demented and filthy, as paranoid as he is obsessive. With wild eyes and sunken cheeks, he rarely sleeps—and when he does, he curls up on the dirt floor with a hulking block of marble for company.
Not until the end of the movie, when you finally glimpse some finished masterpieces, do you realize how little time Konchalovsky spends lensing the man creating his art. Instead, we see Michelangelo struggling to negotiate the demands of the 1500s’ feuding factions in Florence and Rome, the della Rovere and Medici.
In the film’s best scenes, we also witness the momentous task of retrieving the luminous white slabs off Carrera’s cliffs that Michelangelo will turn into some of history’s most famous sculptures. Watching him work with an army of stone-cutters, wielding a system of ropes and pulleys to try to get one gigantic block down the mountain, you’ll be reminded of Fitzcarraldo.
Konchalovsky is equally painterly at conjuring the golden-hued streets of old Florence, and the muralled glory of the Renaissance Vatican. But like its human subject, the scenery and its time are never idealized: butchers hack carcasses in the town square, residents toss their sewage off balconies onto streets, and you never know when you might stumble upon an impaling (presumably care of the Holy Inquisition). Adding to this rich visual world are the deeply religious Michelangelo’s own hallucinations, including one heady scene of a boy angel visiting a dying pope who’s swathed in red velvet, a window’s gauzy white curtains blowing.
The artist himself remains a mystery. Testone tears into the role, and elsewhere, the acting tends to be mannered and over-the-top; someone always seems to be hollering or getting into a fight. But Konchalovsky has crafted a visually spectacular, sensory ode to an era—even if he takes liberties with its subject.
Fast forward to 1980s Naples and Rome and you’ll find a much more revealing portrait in The Ties—this one of a marriage in crisis.
The Ties
The affecting power of Daniele Luchetti’s low-key but handsomely shot domestic drama is how it excavates the damage of an affair in detail, without offering easy moral lessons or resolutions. Think Marriage Story with cobblestone streets and historic Neopolitan apartments.
The movie starts with Vanda (Alba Rohrwacher) and her husband of 12 years, Aldo (Luigi Lo Cascio), who seem to live in a picture of cosy domestic bliss with their two children—until it’s interrupted with a late-night confession that he’s having an affair. They will separate. But will the ties that bind pull them together again? Jump 30 years ahead to find out, when we meet a much older Vanda and Aldo (Silvio Orlando and Laura Morante).
Luchetti bounces fearlessly back and forth between present and past, from different perspectives, to illuminate the complex web of small events that have added up to decades of resentment, pain, and regrets. The acting throughout, especially by the magnetic and intense Rohrwacher as a woman struggling to keep it together, is top-notch.
Enter adult children still scarred by the discord and you have a portrait as messy as anything life can serve up, with the usual unanswerable questions: is it better to try to cut ties, or to try to glue, stitch, or force them together again--especially when there are kids involved?
Related Articles
