Revisiting the portmanteau structure of Night on Earth (1991), the inherent coolness of his signature style portrayed in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), the quietness and intimacy of Paterson (2016), Jim Jarmusch delivers a new film that serves as an opportunity for creative introspection. It is a testament to the good but challenging, unsettling cinema we forgot we needed. Slow-paced to the point of flirting with stillness, this dark comedy depicts all the claustrophobic absurdity of familial relations that make no sense, simply because they do. There is no over-intellectualising, no obvious conflict and no resolution in the premise of the film.
Internationally celebrated, award-winning filmmaker Isabel Coixet is no stranger to the art of navigating difficult life circumstances through a female gaze (My Life Without Me, 2003; The Secret Life of Words, 2005; The Bookshop, 2017). Emancipated from both a patriarchal and formulaic status quo that obscures how experiences of love, loss, and death are felt viscerally and intellectualised clearly, Coixet has consistently created "good cinema"—a cinema of care, grace, empathy, and unwavering purity in its curiosity to discover the truth of her characters.
If love is indeed a language, it is likely one with many dialects. The sort that emerges through the dialogues of a suspenseful dark comedy, with unexpected twists, turns and a meaningful catharsis, just like the one in Ludovica Rampoldi’s intriguing first feature film. It becomes audible through the characters themselves who masterfully carry all the definitions, but equally the ambiguity, sometimes the void behind words, behaviours, motives that remain untranslatable, in principle.
Few filmmakers would have dedicated their first feature film to silence; how its visualisation can be preciously held to address one of the most personal and political issues of our times. Even fewer would have been able to fully express its subtleties, nuanced texture, eloquent power and inherent loudness amidst intervals of words in a mode most cinematic.
With echoes of one the most controversial debates about film, opera and ballet failing spectacularly to pollute film culture but still lingering in the background, my meeting with internationally acclaimed director Damiano Michieletto proved, in hindsight, to be meaningful and necessary rather than serendipitous. Our exchange offered the possibility to not only get to know his work, creative vision and approach to storytelling, but also reflect on the matter of film that really matters.
One’s first, visceral, affect-ridden response to the film may be similar to having been punched in the stomach; by pure cinematic force. A force that is poetic in its harshness and whimsical in its rawness, fully embodied in the outburst of a shirtless, tattoo-clad Barry Keoghan singing on top of his lungs: “Is this too real for ya?”.
