OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA - FRANCESCA COMENCINI: THE TIME IT TAKES/IL TEMPO CHE CI VUOLE (2024) Opening Night Film


FABRIZIO GIFONI, ROMANA MAGGIORA VERGANO IN THE TIME IT TAKES

Surviving the "anni di piombo" to become a director, like her famous father

Francesca Comencini is one of four daughters of mainstream "commedia all'italiana" filmmaker Luigi Comencini, considered to be one of the masters of classic Italian film comedy along with with Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Mario Monicelli.

That was the last sentence of my review of the only other Francesca Comencini film I have seen, In the Factory, (2007), from the 2008 Open Roads Italian film series at Lincoln Center. The Time It Takes is another, very different film. It was the opening night film seventeen years later for the 2025's Open Roads series. The auditorium was full, the audience was enthusiastic. The male star, Fabrizio Gifoni, talking at the Q&A with programmer Dan Sullivan, was enthusiastic and eloquent about the film. He said he had adored it from reading the screenplay through every step of the process.

While the 2007 film was an interesting, but somewhat canned and secondhand, documentry about Italian factories - some audience members thought it was a sellout to FIAT, in the new film Francesca Comencini is working very much for herself, though the film is certainly also a somewhat oddball tribute to her father. It's a tributer to his intense loyalty to his daughter, and his eventual influence on her career development. It never mentions that Luigi Comencini made some of the signaure movies of Italian "neorealismo rosa,"or pink neorealism, and directed many of the major Italian film actors of his day, including the great Alberto Sordi in two famous films and Vittorio De Sica e Gina Lollobrigida in the memorbly named 1954 Pane, Amore e Fantasia in the grand era of Italian postwar recovery and cultural triumph. Francesca Comencini's new film is intensely personal and highly emotional. It is also spare and elegant work, whose mise-en-scène is as memorable as its fine performances by Fabrizio Gifoni and Romana Maggiora Vergano.

The spareness and elegance and emotional intensity, make a strong impression. This a powerful, self-consciously artistic personal portrait, perhas likely to ran one of the director's finest films (it is her fourteenth). But its elimination of detail is also problematic, which I'll say more about later.

We see the spareness in the interiors. Though Gifoni reported that the director rented the former Comencini Rome family residence to film there, the set decoaration has an abstract quality. The bedroom of the little girl version of the daughter, "Francisca," played by Anna Mangiocavallo, is as empty as a Moscow stage set with little other than a bed in it. And indeed the whole film is often like a theatical play, beginning with the focus on only two actors, Gifoni, as "Luigi," first with little Mangiacavallo, then with Romana Maggiora Vergano.

With these spare sets Francesca Comencini achieves an expressionistic effect, creating an unusually intense, collaborative relationship between film director father and the timid little girl, then confused and troubled young woman, later successful filmmaker in her own right. Memorably, the father goes out of his way to intercede for the little girl when she tells him she is being bullied and mocked at her bilingual French school, not only by students but by the teacher. His dramatic intervention in the classroom (and in French) is memorable. Many good sequences follow but this one establishes the idea of a close collaboration that continues through youg adulthood.

Next little Francesca is always on set when Luigi is filming his Pinocchio TV series, which he is known for. In one scene she can't seem to get out of the "campo," the shot. And yet this disruption seems like a kind of collaboration. This was in 1972.

With the full-on "Anni di piombo" of the mid-seventies Francesca is grown up. There is an intense encounter where Luigi repeatedly interrogates Francesca: "Tu ti droghi?" (Are you doing drugs), where she keeps saying no, but later she collapses in the (memorably looming and spare) bathroom, and he screams at her over and over "Mi hai mentito" (You lied to me), and she eventally confesses over and oveer how ashamed she is.

Again, these sequences are like a stage play, and the convulsive troubles the young woman is going through lead into a reference by her father, for reassurance, to Beckett's lines "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." By this the father expresses his complicity - he says he too has often had a sense of failure - along with the consoling belief that one can survive and triumph even in the face of such feelings.

During the worst of the Anni di piombo we see a classroom disrupted when a car-transported louspeaker in the street announces, to the students' applause, the Brigate Rosse kidnapping of President Aldo Moro (who later was killed by the kidnappers). Everything seems shut down, and in his grief and trauma after that, Luigi cannot make films. He seeks refuge in Paris, taking Francesca with him. "What will we do?" she asks. "We'll go to the cinema," he replies. In the aftermath of the drug revelation, he won't let her out of his sight, so the intimacy continues.

Later, Francesca starts making films. She is no longer in the care of her father and some of the sense of complicity has gone. But they have a conversation about filmmaking, and he gives his views. His aim was always to be popular, and he is shsocked that her first film is all about herself. He has never made a film about himself. He recognizes that she is trying to do something artistic. And low and behold, we see her walking toward camera with what looks like a Cannes Palm in her hands. (She has won a number of festival prizes, and a film was in Un Certain Regard at Cannes.)

The film ends with a passage of magic realism or fantasy: Luigi and Francesca flying throught the air with joined hands, till she symbolically lets him go, into the world beyond.

All this makes for a very distinctive film that is very sure of itself and very strong in its emotional picture of daughter and famous father. The trouble with it is that it isn't real. The filmmakng sequences of Pinocchio are quite elaborate, with plenty of extras and full-on recreation of the set, and there are scenes in the street during the political disturbances. There are classrooms full of students, with teachers. But we know how elaboratly scenes are staged in Fellini's films that remain in the realm of dream.

But these aren't dreams; they are more like a trance state in which Francesca obliterates anything other than herself and her father, the way she wants to remember him, and the turbulent years of her youth. Nothing is shown about other relationships, or the fact that Francesca had three sisters, one of whom, Cristina Comencini, is also a filmmaker. Does one get at the essential truth by eliminating many facts of one's life? This is an elegant film and for many an emotionally valid one. But that pared-down quality feels artificial. One thinks of Joanna Hogg's 2019 The Souvenir . It's also an autobiographical film about a young woman who becomes a director, which incidentally uses painstaking recreations of actual places where she lived, and the very problematic young man in her life then. Joanna Hogg however, apart from keeping her parents at more of a remove, doesn't seem to be erasing the surrounding details. It's an interesting comparison.

The Time It Takes/Il tempo che ci vuole, 110 mins., premiered at Venice Se[t. 6, 2024, where Romana Maggiora Vergano won the best actress prize.; showing also at other festivals includng Chicago, Tallin Black Nights, Göteborg, and Rotterdam. 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), where it was the Opening Night film (May 29). Showtimes:

[Thursday, May 29 at 7:00pm – Q&A with Fabrizio Gifuni
Tuesday, June 3 at 4:00pm

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