#17: Viva Italia!
Two new Italian-set movies in theaters now, one good and one great.
For about six years now it’s become apparent that I am all-in on Italians on screen.
If you’re wondering why six years, it’s because in January 2019 I watched Moonstruck for the first time and found its Bucca di Beppo vision of life and love instantly enchanting. Not long after, I watched Big Night (Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub as Italian brothers who must cook a banquet for Louis Prima to save their restaurant), Under the Tuscan Sun (divorcee buys a Tuscan villa), A Room with a View (young English woman has such a ruinously meaningful and sexy time in Florence she can no longer suppress herself British-ly). Then there were the actual Italian films—Fellini (mostly this; changed my life), De Sica, Visconti, the Marcello Mastroianni double bill Marriage Italian Style/Divorce Italian Style, Il Posto, Mafioso.
I feel like the “why” is fairly obvious—art, villas, carnivals, food, sex, the visual excesses of Catholicism, sun, sundresses, yelling, plus I am as much a sucker for the stylings of Nino Rota as I am for the dumb, jubilant novelty of “That’s Amore.”
In any case, any time an Italian(-ish) trailer comes my way, my interest is immediately piqued. That’s how I’ve found myself seated for The Equalizer 3 (perfect), Mafia Mamma (fun!) and The Pope’s Exorcist (terrible). Happily, there are two excellent Italy-set films in theaters right now.
I had no idea The First Omen, an Omen prequel had been in the works until I saw this immensely effective teaser1 in theaters (I did spend the whole minute trying to figure out what the IP was, as I do with many a trailer these days).
The First Omen is the feature debut of Arkasha Stevenson about a young American novitiate nun (Nell Tiger Free) who arrives in Rome in 1971 and begins to notice something’s not quite right in this church/orphanage! What rocks about The First Omen is that up until what seems like a very studio-mandated, Avengers-ass ending (a photo of Gregory Peck from the original film, a reminder that the boy’s name is Damien!! ever heard of him, an awkward and tragically hopeful set-up for a potential sequel), the movie is largely uninterested in its franchise status.
Stevenson is gratifyingly more invested in the story of Margaret, a nun-to-be whose efforts to protect a troubled orphan (who reminds her of her own troubled past! It’s a cliche, it works) from what she believes is run of the mill abuse/indifference from the nuns gradually reveals a more sinister and supernatural conspiracy. The film looks gorgeous and it is a slow, slow, slow burn, taking its sweet time establishing an off-putting gothic mood in a discotheque, in the shadowy corners of Margaret’s bedroom, in the orphanage where things keep happening that are a little (and then very) off, and in the chaos of student protests. When the movie’s finally ready to go for broke, Nell Tiger Free launches into a ferocious, Possession-inspired full body meltdown. If at the beginning I wondered if the world really needed another Alexandra Daddario looking brunette with piercing eyes, I was quickly convinced. She’s a star! Also “Nell Tiger Free” is an insane name and as far as I can tell, it’s her given one?
A quick sidebar to say, this movie’s also worth watching just to see Margaret’s hot roommate Luz (Maria Caballero), a fellow novitiate who likes to party to “remind herself what she’s willingly giving up” and Father Gabriel (Tawfeek Barhom), a rare nice and helpful priest in the joint. I couldn’t find a still of him from the movie, but this is what he looks like!
Like all “we need to impregnate a woman with the devil’s child” films, The First Omen is about bodily autonomy and our right to abortions but the point is made by telling a coherent story about a specific woman instead of declaring the film as An Important Work of Trauma Horror without showing its work. Stevenson can’t totally escape the constraints of IP, but I hope to god she gets a shot at something original soon.
[very light spoilers for La Chimera ahead]
I wanted to see Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera long before any trailers were available, all-in from the first moment I heard whisper of the premise, an English archaeologist/grave-robber played by Josh O’Connor leads a merry band of thieves around Tuscany as they pilfer Etruscan tombs.2
O’Connor plays Arthur, a rumpled Englishman just out of jail who is grieving the unexplained loss of the beautiful Beniamina. He makes his way to the home of Beniamina’s mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini) who lives alone in a crumbling villa, “teaching singing” to a young woman named Italia (Carol Duarte–gawky but charismatic in a sort of Shoshanna-from-Girls way) who she treats like a maid and is occasionally visited by a pack of carnivorous daughters who want to put her in a home. Flora welcomes Arthur back warmly, asks him if he’s found Beniamina yet. He is the only person willing to engage her fantasy that her daughter will, or can, return. Arthur also takes up with his old crew of tombaroli (grave robbers), employing his somewhat supernatural gift for locating grave sites to dig up painted vases and figurines that the dead hoped to take with them to the next life.
There is so much here that is “for me” superficially: Etruscan art, a raucous street carnival, lighthearted perversion, midcentury Italian pop, Mozart. Sometimes I love a movie for the undeniable robustness of its direction and artistry. Sometimes I love a movie because it is the perfect accumulation of things I love. Sometimes, rarely and wonderfully, a movie is both.
I am so moved by each thread that Rohrwacher chooses to follow in this film. Is art theft an act of anticapitalist reclamation when the dead aren’t using them anyway? Or is it a cruel act of profanity against ghosts and gods? Is all art meant for consumption at all, even for the public, in a museum? Rohrwacher has said repeatedly that her cinematic influence here was Indiana Jones. In the film’s best moment, we see the painted frescoes fade instantly as Arthur cracks a tomb open and lets the light in.
Unlike the rest of the tombaroli, Arthur isn’t motivated by the money. He inhabits the world of the dead because that is where the love of his life resides. He is offered a lifeline in Italia, a funny, awkward woman who is fully alive—an inelegant and uninhibited dancer, a financially struggling mother to two children, passionately angry when she finds out what Arthur does. Fabiana, one of the tombaroli, calls her “Viva Italia”—it’s a nickname which is at first condescendingly appreciative of Italia’s dancing and later, a way to mock her drippy, uncool, superstitious attitude toward their stealing.
In the end, Arthur cannot let go of the past and it is Italia who creates a life which represents a way forward. She occupies an abandoned building and infuses it with life—raising her children and bringing in other women with nowhere to go (Fabiana among them), preserving a crumbling bit of history in service of a collectivist future.
La Chimera and The First Omen are in theaters now and you should go!!!
I really love this freaky Fever Ray song they use in the trailer but I also find it SO unsettling that every time I turn it on I get the heebie jeebies and have to turn it off.
I finally saw it for the first time at NYFF last year and wrote about it.
helped me “get” La chimera a little more, thank you! 🇮🇹