I liked this movie, but was mildly surprised to find it getting, here, the uncritical praise it has done.
First of all, for those who haven't seen it, it's a film that gets people raving first and foremost not about the acting (which is excellent, if a little too dispassionate and throttled-back in Antonutti's case for my own tastes), nor the plot (which is resolutely episodic) but the cinematography. The best way I can describe it is to say that it's shot like a succession of Rembrandt paintings brought to life. If ever a film's lighting stole the show, this film is it. Ten out of ten on that score.
Secondly, for those who have seen it, well, didn't anyone else notice what to me was the film's one big flaw? I mean the POV question. Here you have a beautifully filmed version of a subtle, sensitive story of a young girl's relationship with her father. All the way through there is frequent offscreen narrative punctuation in the first person. It's a story quite clearly /told/ from the girl's POV, and all the director needed to do was make sure it was /consistently seen/ from that point of view, both in terms of preferred camera angles and in terms of the information we are allowed access to - and we might have had a full-blown masterpiece on our hands. Instead, the strength and emotional intensity of the film are constantly being diluted by (it seems to me) wholly unnecessary interpolations of information the girl herself /could not have had access to/ (e.g. and most notably, the contents of the letter her father receives from his old flame). Thus, we are artificially distanced from the sense of mystery felt by her by knowing more than she does at key moments, and more than we really need to know ourselves. The magical realism element should have been respected just a little more than it was.
I also think that another less fastidious director might have found ways of quietly pointing up the contributions made by the various narrative episodes (the potentially v. powerful water-divining scene, the relatives' visit, the cinema poster, the glimpse through the cafe window, the lie told to Mum, the graffiti-mad boyfriend) to the film's overarching theme: a vital but absent and mysterious "South" that runs like an underground stream through the girl's youthful, very Northerly experience. The idea is a beautiful one, and the film sort of captures it, but only if you run with the idea yourself quite a bit between scenes. I don't know if the audience's sympathetic imagination needs to be made to work /quite/ so hard in this medium, where just /showing/ is so easy to do.
In short, I think this film is excellent, but could have been better than it was, and deserves a remake.
First of all, for those who haven't seen it, it's a film that gets people raving first and foremost not about the acting (which is excellent, if a little too dispassionate and throttled-back in Antonutti's case for my own tastes), nor the plot (which is resolutely episodic) but the cinematography. The best way I can describe it is to say that it's shot like a succession of Rembrandt paintings brought to life. If ever a film's lighting stole the show, this film is it. Ten out of ten on that score.
Secondly, for those who have seen it, well, didn't anyone else notice what to me was the film's one big flaw? I mean the POV question. Here you have a beautifully filmed version of a subtle, sensitive story of a young girl's relationship with her father. All the way through there is frequent offscreen narrative punctuation in the first person. It's a story quite clearly /told/ from the girl's POV, and all the director needed to do was make sure it was /consistently seen/ from that point of view, both in terms of preferred camera angles and in terms of the information we are allowed access to - and we might have had a full-blown masterpiece on our hands. Instead, the strength and emotional intensity of the film are constantly being diluted by (it seems to me) wholly unnecessary interpolations of information the girl herself /could not have had access to/ (e.g. and most notably, the contents of the letter her father receives from his old flame). Thus, we are artificially distanced from the sense of mystery felt by her by knowing more than she does at key moments, and more than we really need to know ourselves. The magical realism element should have been respected just a little more than it was.
I also think that another less fastidious director might have found ways of quietly pointing up the contributions made by the various narrative episodes (the potentially v. powerful water-divining scene, the relatives' visit, the cinema poster, the glimpse through the cafe window, the lie told to Mum, the graffiti-mad boyfriend) to the film's overarching theme: a vital but absent and mysterious "South" that runs like an underground stream through the girl's youthful, very Northerly experience. The idea is a beautiful one, and the film sort of captures it, but only if you run with the idea yourself quite a bit between scenes. I don't know if the audience's sympathetic imagination needs to be made to work /quite/ so hard in this medium, where just /showing/ is so easy to do.
In short, I think this film is excellent, but could have been better than it was, and deserves a remake.