OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA - PETER KEREKES: WISHING ON A STAR (2024)

An Italian astrologer sends her cleints around the world in search of their dreams

The eccentricity of this film, about an astrologer who sends people on trips, made me think of the Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Sorin, whose little film, Historias Intimas , charmed me so much. That was twenty years ago, and Peter Kerekes is a Slovak filmmaker who is making sometning different from Sorin's stories: a docu-fiction hybrid. But this film is quaint a little bit in the same way as Sorin's.

The astrologer is called Luciana de Leoni D'Asparedo, and she lives in Udine, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy; we hear some of the clipped Friulian dialect spoken by one man and his domineering mother. Luciana believes in change. To prove it, as the film opens she and her husband throw a bunch of furniture and objects off the balcony of their offbeat turreted apartments at year's end, then gather these things and burn them, to "make room for the new." The film us built around Luciana, this quite engaging and rather attractive, cigarette-puffing, spiky-haired lady, her sessions with clients, and followups or background checks, sometimes rapidly intercut and abrupt, on those clients who follow her instructions, or don't and are as they say, or not. Luciana has a sort of magnetism. Of Luciana, the director has said, "I may not believe in astrology, but I believe in her," and we do too.

After exploring the clients' wishes or worries, much like a psychotherpist, instead of prescribing antidepressants or scheduling months of further sessions, Luciana practices the art of astrocartography. She sends them off to an exotic place, following ia system based on the notion that if people celebrate their birthdays at a location calculated in relation to their horoscopes, rebirths will occur for them or they will achieve their dreams. Usual ones, she says, are to get rich, find true love, or make the emptiness go away. "Love," her daughter suggests, "is a bit overvalued." One of the female clients at least does want a man, and humorously yells that from a tower.

Luciana prescribes birthday jaunts to places as far flung as Anchorage (Alaska), São Paulo (Brazil), Hobart (Tasmania), Bridgetown (Barbados), and Mumbai (India). Thereis also Taiwan (Taipei, I guess), and more strange-sounding places.

Perhaps these eccentric sessions and varied rituals, whatever their success in themselves, lead people to find the change they want, or to come to terms with things being the same. Indeed Luciana's husband says at the year's end assessment "Sto bene così": he's fine the way he is. She however states her desire is to return to Naples, where she was born. That may be a big one. But if she can throw her furniture out the window, maybe she can make her way back to Naples from Udine somehow. To make her arcane birthday trip determinations Luciana uses a book with yellowed pages with lots of numbers, a magnifying glass, a keyboard and a computer monitor with either two circular diagrams with numerous lines crossing them, or a program that looks like the ones used by bureaucrats in government offices (I'm quoting here Sergei Tarasov's detailed description on Letterboxd) .

The place named is usually quite unexpected, and far away. A young mother sent to Alaska can't go, so she's suggested to make believe, and she and her daughter soak their bare feet in bowls of ice while sitting in thecompany of a giant model of a polar bear in their living room. They can't do the foot-freezing for long, though.

Another person does go to Taiwan. The very nice looking seventy-year-old woman whose mother's death frees her goes somewhere eastern European, I think, and when she takes a dip in the water in wintertime the police take her to the station, but they think she may be crazy: should they go to a doctor for an assesssment first?

There is a forceful, not entrely appealing pair of red headed twins who say they are opposites. (Why, then, are they dressed and coiffed identically?) One wants to have a baby, and the other doesn't. So they make a plan: one of them will have a baby and then she'll pass it on to her twin to raise the child.

It makes me uncomfortable for the sequences of the young woman married to the cold macellaio (butcher) to be intercut repeatedly with shots of him cutting up meat on a table. Sometimes Peter Kerekes shows no restraint. But in its heart this is a warm, cheerful, and human work, and I'm not sure Carlos Sorin would not have filmed the butcher that way too.

In 2021, Kerekes picked up the Venice Orizzonti award for best screenplay alongside Ivan Ostrochovský for 107 Mothers, which presented the stories of women in the Odesa prison in Ukraine.

Wishing on a Star, 99 mins., premiered Aug. 31, 2024 at Venice Orizzonti, also at Toronto, Chicago, Seville and numerous other European festivals. Reviewed at Tallin by Wendy Ide for ScreenDaily. Screened for this review as part of the FLC-Cinnecittà Open Roads Italian film series at Lincoln Center. Showtime:
Monday, June 2 at 8:30pm

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