We saw this film @ Italian Cinema Fest Budapest, I found several outstanding Italian movies in the past few years, so when the event pop-ed up I thought: yeah, lets give it a try. I'm glad I did...! This was the only film from the repertoire that caught my attention. So much potential in this topic - I thought.
And I have to admit, Roberto de Paolis did a decent job. He mentioned after the film that he was out there in the suburbs and at the Christian community and he choose to write his characters based on Real stories and Real people. I was sure, cause you can't "script-doctor" a thing like that behind a desk...
The whole movie feels so real, sometimes I felt it more being like a documentary than a written story. The actors are amazing... sometimes I even forgot they are actors.
The conflicts, the presentation of the situations, for example how a 18 year old teenager girl faces her worrying mother and the fight that she has with religion, her limits and feelings in her mind. Or how a simple suburb guy faces his family, his shitty work and the Gypsies in the neighborhood.
This is a perfect example of less is more. The movie is slow, but not boring slow, instead you have time to understand the feelings, the relations, and the hard situations of the characters...so this kind of slow adds extra depth instead.
Congratilations to Roberto, it's an awesome first direction, everything was fine tuned, from the story to the camera movement. And I have to admit, that sex scene was one of the most realistic, most livable love-makings I've ever seen on screen...wow...
Plot summary
Agnese and Stefano are profoundly different. She is only seventeen, lives with her mother (a harsh but devoted woman and a regular church-goer) and is about to take a vow of chastity to last until marriage. He is a 25 year old man, with a violent temper and a difficult past behind, who works as a warden in a car park that borders with a gypsy camp. Their unexpected meeting engenders a sentiment of purity, made of little stolen moments and mutual help. But when they make love for the first time, Agnese s illusion of purity is shattered. She experiences a deep sense of betrayal towards her ideals, which leads her to take an extreme decision in the hope of erasing her sin.
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A gem
Italian cinema, suburbs, Pasolini and Vigo
When I was asked to watch this movie and write a review I was a little half hearted. It was a debut for the director, the lead actress and also the lead actor, even if not at his debut, was in his first main role. To my surprise, the movie revealed itself as a masterpiece. Got everything you may need to enjoy great cinema: it is well written, very well acted, telling us about the contradictions of the city of Rome suburbs. But most enjoyable of all, has references to Pasolini's cinema sowed everywhere in the movie: violence, drama and sense of guilty. We also enjoyed the clear reference to Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante" in the ocean bath scene at Lido di Ostia (another of Pasolini's landmarks). I just wished this movie had a better distribution, because it truly deserves to be counted between the best debut movies of the decade.