There have to be easier things than penetrating this movie, like climbing Everest on skis, knitting steam, or convincing Jeremy Corbyn he's a dork. I COULD start by saying that Juliette Binoche is brilliant. There's no answer to that except so what else is new; Binoche is always brilliant. Brilliant is what she does. This is a film of silences. In fact there are more silences here than in the Collected Plays of Harold Pinter; Volumes 1 - 3. It's clearly aimed at the heart of the Academic- Pseud axis because you can speculate what the hell it's about till the cows come home and like all classics of the genre it poses more questions than it answers like where has the girlfriend of the missing son come from, how can she afford to stay indefinitely in the house with no visible means of support and, perhaps crucially, what actually happened the previous summer between her and the son. You could speculate on any or all of this or you could wallow in the sumptuous photography/scenery and Binoche's tour de force or, alternatively, you could play a game of chess in your head. Either way it's a hundred minutes you'll never see again.

"The Wait" ("L'Attesa") is a film that has really nice acting but the story itself didn't do much for me. Its vague ending left me cold and the behaviors of the leading lady, Anna (Juliet Binoche) just didn't make a lot of sense--regardless of what REALLY happened at the end.

When the film begins, Jeanne (Lou de Laâge) arrives at a Sicilian villa and instead of being greeted, she's given a meal by a servant and then retires to bed without seeing the woman of the house, Anna. The next day, Jeanne comes downstairs and finds that there's been some sort of funeral...and Jeanne tells her it's because her brother died...though it's pretty obvious that this might NOT be the truth. Jeanne has come to see Anna's son and spend her vacation with him....but through the course of the film, the son never arrives and Jeanne is feeling abandoned...though Anna and her seem to have a few moments together bonding.

Where does all this go? Well, as I mentioned above, the ending is a bit vague and it's easy to see two very different interpretations. I didn't really care about either one because Anna's actions simply didn't make much sense....and because of that the film lost me. Well acted, this film needed some better writing as the characters didn't always seem realistic or believable.

This visually beautiful, if self-consciously arty, Italian film marks the feature debut of Piero Messina who certainly displays all the promise of a major film-maker if he can only learn to move things along at a somewhat more acceptable pace and be less concerned with the 'look' of his films and more concerned with the feelings of his characters. This is a somewhat high-toned piece based on a play by Pirandello and it's very much designed around the performances of Juliette Binoche as a grieving mother and Lou de Laage as her son's girlfriend. It's certainly well done but it also smacks of the worst kind of art-house cinema; this is Antonioni-light. See it by all means though you may have to keep pinching yourself from time to time to stay awake.