« I told you. » : This is what we scan in Italian the title of the second feature film of Ginevra Elkann presented at the Toronto festival last September and taken over at the GIFF (Geneva International Film Festival). A suffocating black comedy, melancholic while resolutely funny and barred. A real female and feminist cinema shock!
End of a World
As an atmosphere of the end of the century in this choral feature film depicting the simultaneous existence of three women within a drifting Italy. Caterina (Alba Rohrwacher), an alcoholic mother who lost custody of her child, Pupa (Valeria Golino) a pornstar running after his lost youth and Gianna (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) a widow dumped, obsessed with god and nourishing a deserved jealousy but devilishly psychotic, that's not a good thing. But the accumulation of these personal worries in Italy where mercury does not announce less than fifty degrees in the middle of January, nothing like this to put on a perfect explosive cocktail!
At this summary, you'll probably feel like you're dealing with a leading film, and God knows if that's not the case! Te l'avevo detto, if he actually sweats from a tenacious melancholy in his gallery of pathetic characters but o how appreciative, is above all a very black comedy. Unable to resist the comic surrounding the crazy character incarnated by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, lost between violent sexual impulses and Christian repentance, trying vainly to find absolution with Father Bill (Danny Huston who decided to work his Italian accent), a heroic and suicidal priest. Impossible not to laugh – yellow – in front of the portrait of this Pupa made of botox and false eyelashes, surrounded by her cats and dozens of posters of her past successes in pornographic cinema. Same with the third protagonist, an alcoholic swearing her sobriety between two glasses of whiskey.
The minute casserole
Formally, Te l'avevo detto is also surprising by its yellowish, twilight atmospheres, its congested parts of a tenacious mist. The sweaty image of this sick heat that drives the characters crazy and stifles the spectator, pushing them all towards a degorger where, haletants, convulsant, they will all end up. And the more the fog densifies, the more the temperature enlarges the aureoles maculing the shirts of the protagonists, the more tenacious a melancholy takes precedence in the narrative. These characters at the dusk of their lives wave to prolong their earthly debanda for a few moments, and they are as touching as they are pathetic.
Te l'avevo detto We assure you, will be a date film. Surprising, daring, without a doubt cleavage, it offers a vision of feminine and life that rarely escapes from the cinema. A film that upset GIFF programming – since it was added at the very last minute – and rightly... He scored it, half-festival, certainly one of the most striking organ points! So just wait for her release in theaters and wait for Ginevra Elkann's first film, Magari, released in 2019.
[...] resulting movement. And in this sense, it is impossible not not to bring together the Red Sky of Te l
[...] probably don't remember Te lávevo detto, the great Italian film screened last year at the GIFF and which is (very) [...]