OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA - ALISSA JUNG: PATERNAL LEAVE (2025)


LUCA MARINELLI, JULI GRABENHENRICH IN IPATERNAL LEAVE

A girl raised by her mother in Germany goes to Italy to meet her biological father

Teenage Leo (Juli Grabenhenrich), effectively German, goes off with great determination to meet her father in Italy after a fight with her German mother in Germany, staying in touch with mom by cell phone but concealing what she's doing.

This film touches on difficult material in a cool way. The unsympathetic role of the absent father Paolo helps make everythihg feel real, unexpected, but may be a jolt for admirers of the Italian actor playing Paolo, Luca Marinelli (They Call Me Jeeg Robot, Martin Eden), a pretty big star, who's also the husband of the director. This film is largely in English, with occasional subtitled outbursts in Italian or German.

The sheer audacity of her adventure, which causes Leo to throw up as soon as she finds her father, also makes this feel real. Nothing is polite, or goes quite the way anybody wants. Leo has a set of questions to record an interrview. It doesn't work. Efforts at accomodating her while keeping her at a distance are clumsy.

Dad is a surfing coach. He lives in a van. He has a young daughter he's caring for part time; it seems he's not with this mother either. It turns out he is still a flake, fifteen years later.

There are flamingos, which figures toward the end. There is Edoardo (Arturo Gabbriellini, seen in "We Are Who We Are"), a young fellow. who bonds tenderly with Leo. He is gay. She offers to be his pretend girlfriend.

Viewers will vary on how well they like the continued clumsiness, which goes on until something happens that makes Leo and Paolo bond - sort of, enough so that he makes a truly friendly gesture or two. What patient viewers, especially Italians, may like is that Luca Marinelli enters wholeheartedly, no doubt with his director wife's help, into every inconsistent and confused side of Paolo. It's not an easy role to figure out, or to like. And thus it speaks for many actual , real life situations of this kind. The screenplay feels rough, though, lacking a center or a line of development, and the vivid first third isn't quite lived up to by the somewhat drawn-out final two thirds. But it finds many authentic moments. This is the writer-director's feature film debut, and we can look forward to her doing original things in the future.

Patrernal Leave, 111 mins., premiered at the Berlinale Feb. 15, 2025. It was screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads Italian film series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025). Showtimes:

Saturday, May 31 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Alissa Jung
Wednesday, June 4 at 8:45pm

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