Isabella Ragonese, Michele Riondino in Ten Winters Long prologue to love In this bittersweet comedy, a young couple takes ten years to sleep together. Well, actually Silvestro (the winning Michele Riondino) and Camilla (the cool, subtle Isabella Ragonese) share a bed the first night they meet but he tricks her into it and it's only because her house is so cold. He purposely gets off at the wrong vaporetto stop to meet her. She's quite standoffish. He's quite flirtatious. It's winter 1999. Year by year, winter by winter, Mieli's understated little first film picks up with Silvestro and Camilla as their paths cross, their lives change, he continues to want her, and she continues to be unavailable. Until finally that changes.
Ten Winters is a chain of frustrations, but it's also romantic with love-longing. With side trips to Moscow, it's mostly set in the sublime melancholy of Venice out of season, which is the only place all this could happen.
The two young people are consistent from the start. On the vaporetto, boyish Silvestro plays with some kids. When Camilla goes to the bathroom, he steals her hat, glasses and book to get her attention. They're both starting out at the university. He doesn't really know what he wants to do but it's quite logical when eventually, years later, he becomes a "famous clown" in a theater. Camilla is serious and accomplished, but she's painfully reserved, maybe traumatized in some way. She is into theater and studying Russian and goes to Moscow a couple years later. Silvestro finds her frightening, attractive -- an unattainable goal he can't get out of his head. They can't come together but they can't forget about each other.
When Camilla goes to Moscow Silvestro learns how to email and they chat gaily and warmly back and forth. He's living in her little family-owned house where they shared the bed the first night -- they could be pretend siblings. She suggests he come to visit. Six months later he does, a surprise, bringing a cat she left behind, but it's a disaster, because things have changed. She's living with an older, rather handsome theater director called Fyodor (Sergei Zhigunov). She didn't tell Silvestro atout this. The emails had faltered, or not worked. Or she's just not a good communicator. Silvestro leaves immediately, angry and hurt and finding her a fraud. When she went off to Moscow she said she was seeking spiritual solitude. Ha!
Next year, winter 2004, she's back in Venice, withdrawn, preparing a thesis on Chekhov. Though she makes Silvestro help her prepare for her orals at all hours and he faithfully attends her public defense, she has kicked him out of the house because she's "going through a bad time." She and Fyodor broke up. She hasn't told Silvestro much about that either. Silvestro is raising snails. He gives Camilla some and she likes raising them too, another bond between them.
In the euphoria of her triumphant success with the thesis they finally seem about to come together but she gets out of his little boat and goes off, missing the surprise party Silvestro had prepared. She got a phone call. Fyodor has appeared. When she comes home, having told Fyodor she doesn't love him any more, the party is over. Silvestro has cooked Camilla's snails and slept with an English girl in an 18th-century dress, and again he and Camilla have a big clash. In the wake of it, in the winter of 2005, they only glimpse each other at a street market and don't speak. But their faces show they're still interested.
In February 2006 their paths cross socially again as they did the first year or two. Silvestro is studying child psychology now and has a girlfriend, and Camilla is with his friend Simone (Glen Blackhall) and reveals she's pregnant by him. They all go to a wedding in Russia where Silvestro makes a scene. Out in the snow he puts his head on Camilla's lap and tells her he loves her. The girl he's with is none too pleased.
Camilla has her baby but breaks up with the father: another difficult period and she's staying with her own father up in the mountains, in Valdobbiadene. Silvestro is associated with a theater now. He comes to visit her, again after a long pause, and she's very touched, and vulnerable. They kiss passionately, but he doesn't want to have sex in a van with her father nearby. Again, almost but not quite.
Another blank period: in January 2008 they glimpse each other in a square but don't say hello. It's in the winter of 2009 that it finally happens. They meet at an auction of her little house. He put in a bid but it was too low, but they go and revisit the house, find a key, and go in, and the promise of the first night a decade before finally comes true.
Because the action is so thinly spread and the payoff is so quiet the episodic screenplay is hard to carry off, but Mieli, who collaborated on the writing with his wife, very nearly does it.
Ten Winters/Dieci inverni (2009), 99 minutes, in Italian, debuted at Venice, showed at Rome and Tokyo, was in theaters in Italy in December 2009, and is included in a number of US Italian film series this winter. Shown and reviewed as part of the San Francisco Film Society's New Italian Cinema series. San Francisco showings Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 6:00 pm & Saturday and November 20, 2010 at 9:15 pm at Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema.
A RAI Trade (int'l) release of a Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia Production/RAI Cinema/United Film Company production. Director of photoraphy Alessandro Forti, music by Francesco de Luca. Screenplay by Isabella Aguilar, Davide Lantieri and Valerio Mieli from a story by Valerio Mieli.
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