NYFF: Growing Up, Italian Style in 'The Wonders' and 'Misunderstood'

The New York Film Festival begins this Friday. But our screenings have already begun. Here is Glenn on two Italian films, "The Wonders" and "Misunderstood"

If Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) was an ode to the fantastical visions of Federico Fellini's Italy, then Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders is an appropriate return to the world of the country’s famed neorealist movement of the 1940s and ‘50s, concerning itself with the economic and moral quandries of so-called everyday Italians. Coming in second place at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it follows a family in rural Italy who scrape by due their honey farming, but an encounter with a television production in their hometown spearheads the eldest daughter’s desire to lift herself and her family out of the poverty line that they barely manage to survive above.

Perhaps Rohrwacher’s greatest achievement with The Wonders is the way she is able to authentically represent the  rural life of this Italian family without reducing their countryside suffering to lazy miserabilist bleakness. Their world of naturalistic overcast greys and damp browns is countered by the beauty of a region. Rohrwacher lets these moments of beauty linger, too, punctuated by occasional fleeting figments of fantasy at the hands of the wonderful Monica Bellucci. Her appearance as the host of a (rather perplexing) TV show, adorned in billowing costume and pitch-white wig, brings to the film an extra element of surprise that shows the director as a keenly smart filmmaker who knows when to highlight the plight of her characters and when to allow them a reprieve. [More...] 

Not that films should intentionally shy away from representing bleak lives, but I liked how in spite of everything Rohrwacher didn't let her characters be defeated whether that be by each other or by the landscape.

Elsewhere, I appreciated the way the film explored the dynamics of daughters learning a father’s trade and the increased burden that is placed onto them by not just the dad (mocked my local townspeople for his inability to have a son), but society as a whole, to prove their worth. I enjoyed the sumptuous way Rohrwacher and cinematographer Helene Louvart use shadow and light to craft their images, using the shifting clouds of a constantly threatening sky to paint delicate pictures over the terrain and its inhabitants’ bodies. It’s a film that only gets stronger as it goes along, its characters becoming richer and its story more profoundly captivating as their lives take turns that can be both cruel and amusing. The use of Ambra Angiolini's addictive pop tune "T-appartengo" adds a burst of aural delight in a film that typically chooses diegetic sound over score.

I give the film a B+, but having said all of that, I kinda want to give the film an F because I have a phobia of bees and this movie gave me anxiety and heart palpitations that nobody should have to experience. Just look at the poster for crying out loud!

Asia Argento’s Misunderstood probably sits somewhere uncomfortably in the middle of all these famed Italian styles. Its squabbling domestic issues suggest one thing, but the very upper-class, bourgeois subjects at its core suggests another. Whichever direction Argento was pointing her camera at, it doesn’t work. Clearly autobiographical both in story and in setting – the lead character, named Aria, is the daughter of a famous movie personality growing up in the 1980s under a veil of privilege – and with Charlotte Gainsbourg as the mother, I certainly thought there was room for Argento’s vision to shine.

However, it turns out Argento’s vision is two hours of screeching. Not particularly visually stimulating either, Argento has her characters scream everything at a volume well past 11, which makes the more interesting aspects of the film get lost underneath its never-ending vocal shredding. The friendship between Aria and her best friend is nicely fleshed out, detailing the ways that companions can drift in and out depending on whims, and the music cues are on point in much the same way Lucas Moodysson’s We Are the Best was. Likewise, the darker tones that screenwriter Barbara Alberti lends the character speak to wider issues about young women and the pressures they face. However, a school-yard romance, the general hatred of Aria by her classmates, and the fast-disappearance of the film’s most fun and enlivening character (Justin Pearson as a punk rocker boyfriend for Gainsbourg's increasingly strung out mother character) are ultimately mere additional issues in a film that I didn’t feel succeeded at what it was attempting. Furthermore, the father’s fear of bad luck omens (broken mirrors and such) is a particularly silly addition of quirk that the film, already steeped in a sheen of domestic gothic, didn’t need.

Argento’s life is probably great fodder for a film, but when handled as abrasively as this, it’s hard not to grow weary of the attitudes that permeate throughout. As if to add insult to injury, a tone-deaf finale in which Aria/Asia asks us to “be a bit kinder with me” made me openly guffaw. Rarely does Misunderstood work as a film beyond more than just a cathartic purging of familial demons. I have not seen her two previous directorial efforts, but I hear they are similarly narcissistic in tone. Whatever the case, please, next time… turn the volume down. C-

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The Wonders screens Friday Oct 3 (6pm) and Saturday Oct 4 (3.15pm)
Misunderstood screens Saturday Sep 27 (12pm) and Monday Sep 29 (7pm)

Comments

[Henry]

Monica Belluci. I would watch her stand in a corner doing nothing.

[Jan]

I don't want to be in direct contact with bees either, but that poster is beautiful. Definitely one of the best that I've seen this year.

[Glenn]

Jan, you're right. But good grief, all those bees in the movie had me curling up in my seat covering my eyes.

[Travis]

Both films are screening at the local Italian Film Festival. I am looking forward to THE WONDERS, but INCOMPRESA clashes with a local film society screening of the classic Austrian WW2 Cannes-winning film THE LAST BRIDGE, which I was conflicted about. Your review may have made the choice easier for me.

[Travis C]

Both films are screening at the local Italian Film Festival. I am looking forward to THE WONDERS, but INCOMPRESA clashes with a local film society screening of the classic Austrian WW2 Cannes-winning film THE LAST BRIDGE, which I was conflicted about. Your review may have made the choice easier for me.