More OPENS ROADS 2018: Sergio Castellitto's FORTUNATA and Fulvio Risuleo's LOOK UP

The FSLC's series of new Italian films, OPENS ROADS, begins this Thursday, May 31. Here are two more movies very much worth your consideration:

TrustMovies has enjoyed the work of actor/filmmaker Sergio Castellitto for well over two decades now, and while I've appreciated him more as actor than filmmaker (he is shown below, center), I'm pleased to say how much I enjoyed his latest directorial endeavor, FORTUNATA, which was written by Castellitto's screenwriter wife Margaret Mazzantini. Or I should l say I enjoyed at least as much of this film -- about one-third -- as its screening link would allow me to view.

The link began stopping and starting over and over again 30 to 40 minutes into the film, until we finally had to give up watching entirely. These bum links -- which may very well be due to who-knows-what crap going on with our cable provider Comcast -- are perhaps the worst way to try to view a movie ever invented. Even the finest film, under this kind of duress, can begin to make the viewer hate it when access is given for maybe 30 seconds to one minute before it stops all over again. Though I am reviewing only what I could see, this was enough for me to want desperately to be able to finish the film -- which at this point seems not to have any U.S. distribution.

The title character, Fortunata, played with great strength and feeling by an actress we've enjoyed for some years now, Jasmine Trinca (above, right, who last year won Best Actress at Cannes for her performance), with a failed marriage to a nasty, abusive cop (Edoardo Pesce, above, left) only partially behind her, is trying desperately to take proper care of her little girl, even as she attempts to raise the finances needed to open her own beauty salon.

She's got a hunky, long-haired boyfriend (Alessandro Borghi, also seen in this year's Naples in Veils); a group of close caring and maybe-too-controlling friends; and soon she meets an especially kind and helpful psychotherapist (Opens Roads regular Stefano Accorsi, above). The dialog is succulent and strong, the direction and pacing smart and swift, and Ms Trinca (of Miele), as always, is a pleasure to watch in action. At least for those 30-or-so minutes.

Quite often in the yearly roster of Open Roads, an oddball little film crops up that you will not have heard of. Ditto the director, actors and almost anyone else concerned with it. This year's example is something called LOOK UP (Guarda in alto), and it's an absolute delight. (There is at least one actor involved here of whom you will have heard: Lou Castel, of Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket.)  The story involves a young fellow working in a bakery in Rome, who, while taking a cigarette break with his co-workers on the bakery's rooftop, sees an odd-looking bird falling and goes to investigate.

What happens then moves from bizarre to more so, as our young hero, Teco -- played with a sweetness and naivete that is never for one moment unbelievable by a charmer named Giacomo Ferrara (shown above and below) -- becomes involved with everything and everyone from a very strange group of nuns to an even stranger group of children, a female parachutist (below), a pair of nudist twins (who play badminton), an old man who seems to live in a kind of garden paradise -- and lots more.

As directed and co-written (with Andrea Sorini) by Fulvio Risuleo (who clearly has an appreciation for the work of Lewis Carroll), the movie manages to be simultaneously utterly bizarre and completely real, thanks to Risuleo's use of details -- all of which add to the oddness and veracity of these goings-on. Unlike Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, there's nothing magical here. Instead the movie makes use of things we see and hear and experience daily, but the way in which they are put together beggars description (yet not quite belief).

The now pleasingly plump Mr. Castel (above, left) has a wonderful scene midway, and each of the other actors nails his or her moments, as well. Teco's advertures grow more wondrous, delightful, sweet, moving and memorable as the film unfurls, while the details -- from those birds to the bees to a baobob plant to the black cat that crosses our path -- are as lovely as you could want. In fact, only the nuns seems scary (which is as it should be), and even the latter scenes of gambling and naughtiness, while darker, do not seem really threatening.

As the "mute" leader of the children explains near the film's end, there are things in life that we can never understand, and yet they can change and even control us. Consequently, "we need wonders." Amen to that.

Look Up will screen only once at Open Roads -- this Sunday June 3, at 8:30pm -- and it's the kind of one-off movie that you may remember much longer than some of the more obvious choices in this series. So grab it while the opportunity presents. You can access the complete Open Roads series by clicking here.  More to come on this series later in the week...

Streaming tips for the tragic view: try the underseen TWICE BORN and TWO LIVES -- all about parenting and parentage, secrets and lies

These two foreign films, both very much worth seeing and pondering, tackle questions that go to the heart of relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives. Granted, neither film features your everyday problem -- TWO LIVES involves a woman who spied for the East German secret police (the Stassi), while TWICE BORN tracks the history of a single child, born from the rubble and disgust of one of our more horrific modern genocides, the Serbo-Croatian war -- but both movies force us to confront terrible situations and work our way through them.

Twice Born is the glossier of the two, as is usual with the films of Italian actor/director Sergio Castellitto.(Don't Move, Love & Slaps) Adapted by Castellitto and his wife Margaret Mazzantini, from her original novel, the film stars Penelope Cruz (below, left) and a mis-cast Emile Hirsch (below, right) as lovers unable to conceive a child who also become involved in the war in the former Yugoslavia, where they are part of the "arts" community that refuses to believe that said war will ever happen. Castellitto's movie moves back in forth in time and place, from Italy to America to Yugoslavia.

In doing so it never quite finds its focus, so that we trail along thanks to the performers and the gloss and the beauty of some of the actors in display. It's not a difficult watch at all, though it is also never spellbinding -- not, at least, until the final half hour, in which the parentage of the Cruz character's son (played as a young man by Castellitto and Mazzantini's son's Pietro Castellitto, below) comes to the fore.

Suddenly this movie pulls us up short, and from then until its conclusion, we're watching prime and primal stuff. The idea that truth should and will come to the fore is severely tested here. You may find yourself admitting, against everything you've formerly believed, that there is indeed a place in our lives for secrets and lies, where protecting our children is concerned.

Two Lives, another film that divided critics and barely saw the light of theatrical release, tackles parenting and parentage from quite a different angle. Here, a middle-aged German woman, happily married with husband and daughter and living in Norway, finds herself suddenly thrust back to a time when she worked actively with and for the East German Stassi secret police. Since the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the USSR, much of her former life has conveniently disappeared. Co-directed (and very well) by Georg Maas and Judith Kaulmann, who also had their hands in the screenplay,

Now suddenly, it could all come back to destroy what she's carefully built up. This woman, played very well by Juliane Köhler (near left), has quite the checkered history, yet she's proven herself a decent wife and mother, and so we root for her to somehow transcend the past. But the more we slowly learn of that past, the more difficult this transcendence seems. How all this plays out is suspenseful, unsettling and very real.

In the excellent cast are Sven Nordin (far left) as the uncomprehending husband, and Liv Ullman (below, second from left) as a very badly-used mother. What comes through most strongly in this film is how we must finally pay for the past, one way or another.

You can stream both film now via Netflix (and probably elslewhere), as well as viewing them on DVD.

Birkin & Castellitto in Rivette's AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN opens at IFC Center

I'd say Jacques Rivette is lucky to have two stars as charismatic as Jane Birkin and Sergio Castellitto to help ground his new trifle AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (36 vues du Pic Saint Loup). Despite its charming start (a cute-meet that works, opening the movie to its full plot potential) and a few scenes along the way that delight, his film continually threa-
tens and then finally does deflate, like a red balloon that has floated over one too many sharp turrets.

I'm not big on overly expository screenplays, but M. Rivette (shown at right) tends to err in the other direction, giving us a clue or two but refusing to go farther. We (like the character played by Castellitto) know something is wrong with our love interest and leading lady, but due to the refusal of the director and co-writer (with Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent) to fess up (he won't even allow Ms Birkin's character to do so: She consistently refuses to communicate with a guy who clearly cares for her), we viewers remain too much in the dark.

Worse, when we finally do learn a few answers, they are so obvious and soap-opera-like that we can but shrug. Worst all all is how he has used a wonderful actress like Birkin (above, left, with Castellitto) forcing her to babble a long monologue -- one addressed to nobody (she's by herself, you see, in a circus tent) and somehow make it even remotely believable.  No actor should have to do this, but there she is, giving it her all.  The monologue offers clues to character and event that might better have been more artfully filtered throughout the screenplay, rather than foisted upon us in a single, undigestible lump that must have been a tad trying for the actress.  That would have taken some more work, however, and this film, being a "lark," well, there's no need.

TrustMovies admires (you may, too) Rivette's love of and delight in the small, down-on-its-luck circus and its performers that provide the background for the film.  There is charm to be found here, in the alternately silly/funny tricks and acts on display, but considering the amount of time spent in and around this one-ring show, the return-on-investment isn't much.  References and quotes abound, everyone from Shakespeare to Donald Rumsfeld gets his licks in, as does the past, lost love, current attraction and games of control.

The biggest treat, aside from the two stars, may be the gorgeous French mountain country, an example of which is shown at left. Eventually, though, the movie becomes for us viewers much like it has been for Castellitto's character. It's as though we've taken a vacation and spent some odd time with a group of people that appear to invite us in -- only to leave us out.

Less lengthy than any other of this fabled French filmmaker's work that I know (two hours is short for Rivette), the movie's 84-minute running time does help in reaching the conclusion more quickly.  I can't imagine any diehard fans missing the film, though, at this late date in his career (Rivette's 82), it probably will not bring him new converts.

Around a Small Mountain, from The Cinema Guild, opens this Friday, July 9, in New York City exclusively at the IFC Center.  You can find additional playdates, with cities and theaters, here.

Open Roads: Alessandro Angelini's film RAISE YOUR HEAD makes its NYC debut

It had to happen, right?   After praising this year's FSLC festival of new Italian films as one without (yet) a single "miss" in the bunch, TrustMovies has finally seen a less-then-stellar movie: RAISE YOUR HEAD (starring popular actor Sergio Castellitto, above), the director and co-writer of which, Alessandro Angelini, was present to introduce the film and promised to appear post-movie for a Q&A.

To meet deadlines (and perhaps force himself not to ask any negative questions), TM beat a hasty retreat as the lights came up at the Walter Reade theater. Consequently, he does not have a precis of what Signore Angelini had to say to the questions asked. You can find my review of the film here (click and scroll down) -- in the one-time round-up of the entire Open Roads festival.