Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat Jun 07, 2008 1:17 pm 
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Muted crises

Stefano Coletta has been a cameraman and assistant director since 1972, but this is the first time he's directed a film. He may be trying to make up for lost time with this orchestral grabbag that attempts to plumb the depths of a handful of people ranging from a gay university student and a prostitute to a group of Turin professional men and their wives and daughters. It's all held together by, naturally, glossy camerawork, and a warm and mellow jazz score. Coletta might not like to be compared to Gabrile Muccino, whose successful and more mainstream films are symphonic portraits of generations, all of whose members, whether sixteen or sixty, seem to be having midlife crises. But Coletta seems to be doing the same kind of thing here, only with an intellectual art gloss. Muccino is a midcult director, but he has style. He also may have his finger on the pulse of Italy's current superficialities than any high style auteurs. When he's wound up to the right pitch his scenes have a wonderful sense of urgency. He knows how to build into little crescendos and slide off again, making you eager for more and never losing his rhythm. His contemporary Italians may be floundering, but his depictions of them are energetic. Coletta has too many depths to plumb and never achieves Muccino's sense of urgency, partly through a technical sluggishness and partly because he hasn't got enough happening--and doesn't know how to let his scenes breathe either.

An Unusual Time to Meet/Appuntamento a ora insolita brings to mind the truism that nobody is as happy as they may appear. The rich lawyer hates his devoted wife and sees a shrink on the sly to vent. The professor fails to seduce a female student and his wife cheats on him. A theater director who is single and lonely deludes himself that he can have a long-term relationship with the prostitute. A woman near middle age finds out to her delight that she is pregnant but doesn't tell her husband. The prostitute rejects the director because she sees, even if he can't, that he doesn't respect her.

These man--surprise surprise--were revoutionaries in their youth in the Sixties. One of them was going to be a painter. Some of them often, all of them sometimes, are nostalgic about those breathless early days. Several people have encounters with somebody they were involved with thirty years ago--but it's no go. These things can't be revived. (This has its parallel in Muccino's The Last Kiss; but while Stefania Sandrelli's scenes were specific and winning, these are relatively flat and lame.) The question Coletta asks is whether anybody understands who they used to be, what a proper relationship between one's past and present self should be. But this is a generalization for which he finds no strong objective correlative in the events of the film, which read overall as desultory. A little more desperation, please, if any of this matters.

The closest thing An Unusual Time to Meet has to a climax is a dinner where two of the couples confront each other. Not a great deal comes of it. More on the periphery, the gay boy is in love, but his friend rejects who they are. Yet he seems happy in his seeking, even if a female friend accuses him of being hopelessly romantic. Another young woman accuses her boyfriend of not giving her the kind of lovemaking he promised, but he points out it's awkward in a car. "But you don't keep your promises," she says. "Nobody does," he answers. So there you have it. Coletta, in a Q&A after the film's Lincoln Center debut, said he doesn't want to supply answers. Fine, but his film doesn't have the jazz, except for the soundtrack. Note: parts of the film are dubbed, an old, bad Italian habit, and at the collective dinner the lips and timbres of voices are badly out of synch with the visuals.

Shown at the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center, New York, June 2008.

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