Despite being active for roughly five decades, with a handful of theatrical and television works within his filmography — including his 1980 debut To Love the Damned and 2003’s six-hour magnum opus The Best of Youth — the 73-year-old Milanese filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana still holds a quite minor status and appeal, at least, outside of Italy and some specific European cinephilic circles. Giordana’s films are meticulous, emotionally-charged portrayals fixed within historical and/or political contexts, and are often concerned with notions of estrangement, familial or romantic bonds, and the passage of time. His latest effort, The Life Apart, is no exception to this calculus.
Adapted from Mariapia Veladiano’s acclaimed eponymous novel and co-scripted with Marco Bellocchio and Gloria Malatesta, the film opens, after a brief expressive intro reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period paintings, in the beautiful Northern Italian city of Vicenza in 1980, where wealthy couple Maria (Valentina Bellè) and Osvaldo Macola (Paolo Pierobon) are soon to have their first child around Christmas Eve — one of the occasional Catholic allusions we will see throughout the film. Their newborn daughter Rebecca (played as a 6-year-old by Viola Basso, at the age of ten by Sara Ciocca, and later as a young woman by the promising new talent Beatrice Barison), however, comes into this world with a red and startlingly large facial birthmark, which from the very beginning causes her mother to collapse into something of a depressive state, directing continuous a passive-aggressive attitude toward her daughter. But despite Rebecca’s unusual appearance, as she reaches the age of six, she miraculously demonstrates both fascination with and talent for the piano. While shunned by her mentally unstable mother, her usually absent and workaholic father, and later bullied by the conservatory students, the child prodigy has only the supportive piano virtuoso Aunt Erminia (Sonia Bergamasco) and her working-class childhood deskmate Lucilla to confide in throughout her life.
With a very keen eye for both architectural structures and psychological spaces, Giordana masterfully employs an economical narrative and neoclassical aesthetic in transforming this half-Ugly Duckling, half-Phantom of the Opera tale into a patient and passionate modern-day Renaissance tableau exploring simultaneous grace and damnation, beauty and tragedy, woe and wonder. Rebecca, unlike Brian De Palma’s Carrie, for instance, is a rejected wunderkind whose extraordinary powers simply lie in music, allowing her to find solace, confidence, and further acceptance in the world. Part of the film’s beauty and magnificence, then, is in the way Giordana constantly reflects the contrast between the inter- and intrapersonal silences and musical expressions. It’s a calmly paced and subtly composed work.
And while Giordana’s uniquely polished style of storytelling is unwaveringly dedicated to the gradual narrative developments and unhurried elaborative characterization through his precise mise-en-scène and lyrical sensibilities, the director also doesn’t shy away from welcoming some dream/nightmare sequences or magical intervals — for instance, when some old sculptural busts burst to life before Rebecca’s very eyes — whenever possible. Although the film draws evident inspiration from the likes of Bellocchio and Bernardo Bertolucci — the two iconic Italian cinéastes to whom Giordana always pays homage — what’s fascinating this time out is how Giordana sketches The Life Apart’s borders with shades of Ingmar Bergman’s late-film character. It’s hard not to view this film’s emotional depth and visual splendor as something of an Italian equivalent for a combination of Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander with Sarabande. The Life Apart is a superb film, as much enlivened with the empyrean forces of art and creation as it is pensive with regard to its character’s earthly sufferings and destructive relationships.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 2.
