ENRICO LO VERSO AND NATASSJA KINSKI IN THE NIGHTSHIFT BELONGS TO THE STARS

A meaningful climb

The Nightshift Belongs to the Stars is one of two well-received collaborations by Edoardo Ponti on 25-minute short films with the famous Italian writer Erri De Luca, the other being an adaptation by De Luca of Jean Cocteau's La voix humaine (The Human Voice), starring Sofia Loren. Nightshift is De Luca's own original screenplay. Details are elided, but Sonia (a more mature and solid Natassja Kinski) and Matteo (Enrico Lo Verso, who starred in two of Gianni Amelio's best films, Stolen Children and Lamerica) are experienced mountain climbers who've met in therapy after open heart surgery, and agreed to get together six months later to do a climb in the Dolomites, in Trentino. It's not going to be easy. She has had a new valve installed and he has had a transplant. A young woman's heart runs his body, and he talks to it as if if were the young woman it used to belong to (this idea of an alien being possessing a heart transplant patient is also exploited in Claire Denis's fascinating The Intruder/L'Intrus). The climb is also emotionally tricky and perhaps emotionally important. Matteo's situation remains mysterious, but Sonia remains distant from her partner, Mark (Julian Sands), who surprises her and Matteo by climbing to the top by an easy mountain path, and greets them when they get there. He is understandably jealous. And the climb may be important to Matteo and Sonia in more ways than one.

The film is full of the physicality of the climb, but still seems almost more about the unseen than the seen: Matteo's young female companion, who seems to to hover beside him; Sonia's troubles with Mark, which this climb may assuage. Erri De Luca, who has done some acting in movies lately and is also himself reportedly a passionate mountain climber, and has a suitably wiry and weathered look, makes a vivid impression in a small role here as a climber friend of Matteo's who hangs out with him before the climb. The climb itself is shot impressively, with closeup and distant shots using a helicopter, and the two actors acquit themselves convincingly despite never having climbed.

Edoardo Ponti is the son of the great Italian producer Carlo Ponti and his wife Sofia Loren, which may help explain how in he has been able to attract heavy hitters for the casts of his films. The cast of his 2002 feature debut Between Strangers Hollywood Reporter's Deborah Young called "dazzling, if underused," but Young described the film, which also starred Sofia Loren, as having "all the dramatic credibility of a TV movie." More modest is the cast of his lightweight 2011 comedy Coming and Going, which starred Ponti's wife Sasha Alexander; but it seems itself to have done its coming and going without much notice. Maybe shorts are Ponti's true forte. Both Nightshift and Human Voice are impressive, and Nightshift moves unhurriedly, in so doing easily taking on the weight of a feature film, while avoiding tidy resolutions. Kurt Brokow, writing for the online media review The Independent in May 2013, said that Nightshift was easily the best and most memorable of the 60 Tribeca short films of that year, all of which he had watched. In fact it was chosen as Trobeca's 2013 Best Narrative Short. It has also been shortlisted for the Oscar in this category.

The Nightshift Belongs to the Stars/Il turno di notte lo fanno le stelle, 23 mins., debuted in Italy November 2012. It showed at Newport Beach and Tribeca in early 20-13. Screened as part of the San Francisco Film Society's New Italian Cinema series, Nov. 19-23, 2014. It shows November 19, 2014, 6:30 p.m. as part of an event , "An evening with Edoardo Ponti."

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.