MARIO MARTONE: TROUBLING LOVE/L'AMORE MOLESTO (1995) - OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA 2023
ANNA BONAIUTO IN L'AMORE MOLESTOTRAILERIn gorgeous search of lost somethings This is a film of great beauty from the most admired writer of contemporary Italy, Elena Ferrante, her first novel, which series-featured auteur Mario Martone presents in a fresh mix of brilliant Eastman Technicolor and period sepia that, though 28 years old, looks newly minted. And that red dress! On the body of Delia (popular and
simpatica Anna Bonaiuto), the protagonist/daughter/detective/analyst of the story, it fits so perfectly, once she dons it, she remains long unwilling to take it off. One can almost love this movie without understanding it. But as one who has never been able to tune in to the feminine,
meridionale southern Italian saga-melodrama world of this internationally celebrated writer, despite savoring the feel of multicolored noirish magic given off by
L'amore molesto, and appreciating the leanness of its 104 minutes, I found it baffling and inexplicable. (As a longtime student of Italian, I have also never learned to love the swallowed truncations of Neapolitan or Sicilian dialects - another possible obstacle - just as I've never quite warmed to the twang of Québecois French.)
Delia lives alone now in Bologna and makes a living as a comic strip artist. Getting a rather strange call from her mother Amalia (Angela Luce) in high spirits, she returns to her native Naples for Amalia's birthday, to find her parent has washed up on the shore dead. (Naples will be a key character: the long-lens-emphasized crowd scenes of the city and its varied public transportation almost burst off the screen.) The coroner declares nothing amiss (what about the homicide detectives?), but Delia unsurprisingly finds the circumstances peculiar, and lingers to explore recent relationships but also delve into not so much her mother's death as her life, and above all moments of her own, Delia's, childhood, and flowing through it all "another man," tall, with wavy gray hair, in a handsome linen suit, "very elegant," someone says - the man, or perhaps the suit? - who appears and reappears, as does his boisterous son Antonio (Peppe Lanzetta).
This "elegant" man, Nicola Polliedro (Giovanni Viglietti) but known as Caserta, is still around, and teases Delia like a sleazy but well-dressed phantom. A miscreant, thief, and freeloader even into the present day, Caserta represents Italian male charm at its most durable and dubious. He is old and wrinkly, but he is tall and well dressed, has good hair, thinks well of himself - and is nimble on his feet. Delia chases him up and down an old building in vain: why? This is a sequence that might work better on the page than on the screen: when we see it, it becomes harder to see this as actually happening.
In the case of Delia's actual encounter with Caserta's rude and inelegant but equally full-of-himself son Antonio (Peppe Lanzetta), who runs a clothing store now, what's so hard is not to believe it's happening but to understand how Delia puts up with his behavior, following him to a sauna (well yes, he was a childhood friend) where he molests her and yet she goes right on sitting with him and talking to him. This encounter is troubling, while a visit to the artist father (Italo Celoro) is too brief and disappointing, a footnote.
What troubles me more globally is the way the film - presumably Ferrante in the novel - weaves elements in and out, present and past, without in doing so quite answering the viewer's basic questions, assuming that, as for the Ferrante devotee may be true, we all simply hang on Delia's musings and don't care. It is plain that what happened between Caserta and Amalia recently and how Amalia died don't matter to her but are merely hors d'oeuvres leading us to the main dish of what happened to Delia and what she did at the age of seven.
A recent anglophone DVD rating person,
myreviewercom, who gives the film rather short shrift (she should have seen it on the magnificent screen with the exquisite sound of FLC's Walter Reade Theater as I did), points out Delia's three symbolic costumes: the severe pants suit she travels from Bologna wearing; the aforementioned red dress, "supposedly chosen for her birthday by her mother", to plunge into the sensuous world of Naples and her and her mother's memories; and her mother's old two piece dress suit she finally puts on, signaling the moment when Delia either "decides she's had enough" and "will never find out what has happened" or concludes that "the hinted at secrets" are "too painful" to unearth. She also decides in penance for childhood wrongdoing symbolically to
become her mother.) The reviewer, like me, was left uncertain over what it all means. This seems partly a case where reverent film adapters have tried to cram too much of their source novel into a movie runtime and wound up resultingly making a confusing film.
The difference is tha
t I'm not puzzled about why this film was in Competition at Cannes and won multiple top Italian awards for the year.
L'amore molesto shows the gifted, fluent Mario Martone at the top of his cinematic powers. It is a magnificent film to look at. In a way it is better than the other two of his films, also fine, shown at this year's Open Roads FLC series. The new film
Nostalgia, also from a novel, also about a return to Naples, makes more sense and is more satisfying, but it is relatively drab, all focus on the storytelling, satisfying, certainly, but without the orgasmic sound and image of
L'amore molesto. Martone's 2014
Leopardi: il giovane favoloso is gorgeous and fluent and rich in mise-en-scène too. But it has the limitations of the conventional biopic, the rush to tell a story, and lacks the mystery and poetry of the other two.
Delving into past experiences and family secrets has never been more beautiful or well suggested or integrated with a rich urban environment as in
L'amore molesto. But the crime-detection intro is misleading and, as the DVD reviewer suggests, it's all, in this adapted version of Ferrante's novel at least, a bit of a tease. The mystery isn't solved. Nor is the madeleine traced to the primal memory. This turns out to be a beautiful ride to somewhere not fully specified.
Troubling Love/L'amore molesto, 104 mins., debuted at Cannes May 23, 1995 after an April release in Italy. It showed at some other festivals and released internationally. At home it captured three David Di Donatello Awards in 1995 — Best Actress for Bonaiuto, Best Director for Martone, and Best Supporting Actress for Angela Luce as Delia’s mother. [The title has also been translated as "Nasty Love." Let's admit we just can't capture "amore molesto" in English.] Screened for this review at the Walter Reade Theater Jun. 6, 2023 at 9:00 pm as part of the Cinecittà-Film at Lincoln Center Jun. 1-18, 2023 series Open Roads: New American Cinema.
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