MARIANA FONATANA IN LUCE

OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA - SILVIA LUZI, LUCA BELLINO: LUCE (2024)

A factory worker on the brink of meltdown

There's not much plotline here, making this more like a short story than a book, a brief cameo, really, thoough an evocative one, because it is all so intense. Reality and dream blur in this dreamy, chaotic, disquieting film focused on a sad, dreamy-eyed, nameless young woman (Mariana Fontana, who gives her all) who seems increasingly obsessed with her incarcerated father. She is pretty, in a dark, unhappy sort of way, but she is haunted and distracted: a pale olive Madonna of the leather mills.

She works on the production line of a leather tannery in the mountainous, misty Italian South, also the setting of Open Roads' Basileia, but this time it is Solofra, in the province of Avellino. It's a tough local town and the coworkers are rude women who speak roughy to each other. There is a direct relationship subtly alluded to very early (as I learned from the review by Aldo Spiniello on Sentieri SelvaggI, the Italian movie website) between this film and the filmmakers' previous one, Il cratere,. It too focused on the morbid relationship between a father and his daughter. The unnamed protagoist of Luce lives in a world of fantasy, outside of the grim task of stretching leather in the factory, whee the supervisor punishes workers by sending them upstairs to work on the "drum," where great heavy mounds of leather have to be hand-loaded on a dumbwaiter device that takes them below.

I learn also from Aldo Spiniello that the filmmakers previously made a documentary about a factory workers' revolt called Dell'arte della guerra .. These tannery workers may be on the edge of revolt, or warring among themselves. And the lead actress worked in a leather factory for "a few months," according to Spiniella, to prepare for the role, and non-actors play her coworkers at the place for authenticity. (Authenticity amid unreality: but this is a feature of today's films.)

The young woman's self-obsession focuses on "chats" with a man on her cell phone (voiced by Tommaso Ragno) who may or may not be her father and may or may not be in prison (and who after being insinuating and cajoling, calls to tell her never to call again). She also has a fashionable young man from Milan, a "stilista," interested in her; or does she? She also loves dancing and tries to tempt others to accompany her. Dance sequences seem to have the kind of claustrophobic intensity the filmmakers like.

But we should point out hat this is a confined visual world where the camera is nearly always hovering or rocking feverishly up close on Mariana Fontana, with the field of vision very short; I was reminded of László Nemes's terrifying debut film Son of Saul (NYFF 2015). But that was the world of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. This woman's world surely isn't as fatal and threatening as that. But it's barely more cheerful.

As a frenetic counterpoint there is a young man who's a photographer and makes liberal and somewhat dubious use of drones to spy on people from above, and he collaborates with the young woman, putatively to photograph her father from above the prison. He may be interested in the young woman, and vice versa. He speaks in a high pitched voice and in a disquietingly nervous, machinegun fashion. The whole film is nervous, haunted, frenetic, disturbing in its mood.

Peter Bradshaw saw this film at Locarno and reviewed it in the Guardian nine months ago. He pointed out how it's never clear what is dream and what is reality, or whether everything is a dream, and the puzzles are left unsolved at the end. He concluded that for him the whole film is a "puzzle" about "how we see ourselves, or invent ourselves." But if so only temorariliy, one hopes, because this whole film, beautiful to look at and disquieting, feels very much like the product of a fevered imagination, hovering on the brink of meltdown.

Luce, 93 mins., premiered at Locarno Aug. 9, 2024, and also showed at the Rome Festival in Oct. Screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads, the Italian film festival at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025). Showtime:

Saturday, May 31 at 9:00pm – Q&A with Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino

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