Sexless showers of the eternal movie-goer

Rather poetic title for a relatively unpoetic day. Work in the morning. Meeting midday. And then to the movies.

Why the title? Just thinking about how I am learning to do things by myself. Go to movies. Take showers. I had forgotten the pleasures of a solo shower, (despite heartily missing certain components of unmentionable showers). Eat at a sidewalk café with a stack of papers to grade. That was my afternoon, not in that order. I even indulged in a Bohemia, because the sun felt so good and I am really starting to like a nice cerveza al sol...

It felt like old times, though I must admit standing under the inclement UV rays cannot possibly be beneficial to my skin. You meet the most interesting people when you are alone, as if you were a free radical, an unlinked carbon bond, an electron heavy atom. The elderly woman sitting next to me, incidentally, was a porteña, and a Jew, living in NY who just happened to be in town, and the strangest thing was that she (well not that strange, I guess) spent every summer of her youth in Miramar, and she knew Swarthmore (my youthful stomping grounds) because her husband (on the other side of her) was from Philadelphia too and his cousin taught at the college. It never ceases to amaze me how truly small the world is, or how strangely linked certain people seem to be. The nice thing about being at the movies alone is that when you can't sit still (like me) or pick one position, there is nobody immediately next to you to be bothered by your readjustments, or if they are bothered, they are strangers enough to politely ignore you through their annoyance. But there were a few people just behind me that wouldn't stop whispering throughout the entire film, and part of me wishes that I would have had the energy to turn and glare harder than the few brief over-the-shoulder pointed glances. Then of course you realize in what a small community you actually live as you practically (literally) run into not one, but two of your (unassociated) professors waiting for the following screenings.

So about the film.
God it sounded just like Spanish. I firmly believe I could get by understanding a good 85% of what I hear if people were to speak Italian with that particular accent. (Question to self of amusement: "virgula" is "comma" in Italian too (perhaps not spelled like the Portuguese) but funny, I wonder what they would call the little voice clouds which demarcate speaking that come out of the mouths of the pre-Colombian figures in their glyphs, would they also be, as in Spanish, "vírgulas"?)


Quando sei nato Dir. Marco Giordana

This film on the whole was solid. It told a manageable story, it explored questions of race and class from the interesting position of an over-privileged yet sweet and likeable pre-pubescent boy; it was plausible in its demonstration of the clandestine immigration problems that plague (I imagine) most of the more developed EU countries. There were certainly moments of brilliance. Some beautiful shots, of note, on the boat of illegals, from underneath with feet hanging down from the upper gallery and the closing shot on the streets of Milan with the little boy and the little girl, divested of their innocence in very different ways, sitting together, quite literally breaking bread but with a tense triangular distance between the two. Beautiful, really.
There were also several humorous tension releasers, throughout, truths too embarrasing not to be recognized by all, being humilliated in front of cute girls by Dad, being recognized as that boy that fell of the boat... The adult characters were not despicable, but their foibles were unabashedly displayed, the acting was steady but not exceptional.

But I felt that the film could have used some editing, not only because it was about 20 minutes too long, but because it could use some reorganization of narrative. Sure there were tension building scenes in which we, the audience, knew (or thought we knew) what was going to happen, and we were inwardly begging the characters on the screen to shake themselves from the ignorance in which they were trapped - but this is a tool that if abused, grows stale. There were a good many superfluous scenes which could have been cut down or condensed, like the filming of the girls in the shower at the refugee center, it had no parallel structure nor explicable narrative function beyond a director's wet dream (which wasn't to say it wasn't a lovely one, just extraneous). Also, though I am apt to cry at films, and this was no exception, I didn't feel like I truly, deeply cared for the characters, or connected enough with them, and I am not quite sure why, only that, for example, the scene that examines the parents' grief at the loss of their son carries no emotional weight whatsoever, despite showing exactly how their relationship was doomed to fall apart after such a tragic event, precisely because as audience, we already knew what they didn't, and so we didn't care that the mother didn't want to be touched, or the father was hallucinating the last moments of his son's life, those were moot points. A missed opportunity, I thought, and I also thought that not enough deep character work was done with the reassimilation process after they discover that their son is indeed not dead and comes home. It was as if nothing had changed, when in reality, everything had.

Music was a highlight, (especially because it included gypsy music and my very favorite song from Madredeus on O Paraiso) though the "drowning scene" which I also felt, though beautiful, relied too heavily on similar scenes from other films (damn, no good example comes to mind, but there are so many) and I was distracted by the music which was from the original score of Jane Campion's The piano. When you make such a direct citation of another film score, especially one with which the music was of utmost importance, you run the risk of having that movie superimpose itself on the one that you are making, and in this case I could only see the Maori face of Harvey Keitel and the sweeping hands of Holly Hunter, and the emotion didn't seem to fit... (simplemente no cuadró).

All told, it was an ambitious film (and I wish I could say I had read the narrative on which it is based, but alas, I have not) that merits an attentive watching for its beauty, for the spectacular acting on the part of the children, and its occasional sparkles of brilliance.