Dormant Beauty (Bella
Addormentata)
Venice Review
5:56 AM PDT 9/5/2012
By Deborah Young
 |
| Maya Sansa and Pier Giorgio Bellocchio in Dormant Beauty |
The Bottom Line
Marco Bellocchio reaffirms the
dignity of life in another film of sparkling intelligence, set around a
real-life euthanasia case.
Italian master Marco Bellocchio's tale of a modern-day
Sleeping Beauty features a top cast top-lining Toni Servillo, Isabelle Huppert,
Alba Rohrwacher and Maya Sansa.
With typical
intelligence and complexity, director Marco Bellocchio weaves
three stories around the politically hot topic of euthanasia, turning a
real-life Italian national drama into engrossing narrative for sophisticated
audiences. Refusing to offer easy answers or perspectives, Dormant
Beauty is directed in such a way it doesn’t need to take a clear-cut
position on the question, because like all the director’s work it has no
concern with convincing people of anything, but a great deal of interest in
illuminating contemporary Italian society. Its unqualified success in doing so
should make it a full-fledged contender for a major prize at Venice and help it
to closely imitate the international sales of his recent work.
Like Bellocchio’s film
about the Aldo Moro assassination, Good Morning, Night, the story takes
off from real events that obsessed Italians in 2009 when Beppe Englaro decided to
take his daughter Eluana, in a coma for 17 years following a car accident,
off mechanical life support. The most remarkable thing about the case was the
father’s insistence on seeing Italian law applied rather than taking the easy
route of doing it quietly on the sly (the film shows two examples). The case of
Eluana became a cause celebre that pitted pro-life activists against the
girl’s family; prime minister Silvio Berlusconi also got
involved and politicians, seeing fertile ground for cashing in on voters’
strong feelings, turned the sad case into a parliamentary vote.
The case is still a hot
topic as shown by the fact that the Northeast province and region of
Friuli-Venezia Giulia, where the film was shot, took the almost unbelievable
step of cancelling their active Film Commission, theoretically for budget
reasons but most probably to block financing to this film and avoid
controversy. The Film Commission logo does appear on the opening credits,
however.
As might be expected
from the director of My Mother’s Smile, a.k.a.The Religion
Hour, Catholic vs. secular views about euthanasia square off. The
religious-minded young Maria (Alba Rohrwacher sporting a no-makeup,
Catholic schoolgirl look) demonstrates on the opposite side of police lines
from a boy she likes, Roberto (Michele Riondino), and his rabidly angry,
mentally ill brother. It’s an honest, clean relationship that leaps across
ideological barriers, at least while they fall in love.
In another story so
subtly interwoven it seems to overlap, a famous actress (Isabelle Huppert)
obsessively cares for her own coma-stricken sleeping beauty, her daughter Rosa,
with a small army of nurses and nuns. Though no cardinals or bishops appear in
the story, Huppert embodies the Catholic p.o.v.; her neglected son even calls
her “the Divine Mother.” It’s not a disrespectful portrait of a mother’s pain,
but the very fact that the cold Huppert plays a Francesca Bertini-style diva,
one who dreams of Lady Macbeth in her sleep, signals how distant she is from
the screenwriters’ affection.
In a third story, Dr.
Pallido (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio) becomes attracted to a beautiful,
suicidal drug addict (Maya Sansa) and watches over her sedated sleep in
a public hospital, while doctors and orderlies are cynically betting on how
long Eluana will survive. The young doctor’s attention may not be
disinterested, but it offers space to affirm the positive value of life and
freedom: “You’re free to kill yourself,” he tells the girl, “and I’m free
to try to stop you.”
The film’s real center
of empathy, however, is Toni Servillo’s very human
impersonation of Uliano Beffardi, an honest politician. A first-term senator
elected for Berlusconi’s party, he’s called on to vote for a law against
euthanasia designed specifically to stop Eluana Englaro from being taken off
life support. It goes completely against his conscience, especially given a
traumatic event in his past.
Uliano contemplates
resigning from office to honor his beliefs, but he’s deathly afraid of losing
the trust of his daughter, Maria. Their differing ideas about the Englaro case
are a painful source of friction. Meanwhile, he reluctantly goes to Rome where
the political tension is peaking as the vote approaches.
Remarkably, Bellocchio
takes time out for wry humor that will help the film immeasurably at the
Italian box office and beyond. The script he wrote with Stefano Rulli and Veronica
Raimocontains a scene for the archives that tears the political class to
pieces, allowing the best of Italian liberalism to triumph for one brief
moment. The droll, lined face of Roberto Herlitzka, who played Aldo
Moro, animates the surreal figure of a shrink who seems to work in the Senate
(or maybe in party headquarters) prescribing uppers and downers to depressed
politicians. There’s even a candle-lit Turkish bath where the pols relax like
ancient Roman senators, with their heads sticking out of a steamy pool while
they watch closed-circuit TV of live parliamentary debates.
Bellocchio’s excellent
technical crew lead by director of photography Daniele Cipri’ (who
directed Toni Servillo in the other Italian film in Venice competition, It
Was the Son) gives the film a dark, rich look echoed in Carlo
Crivelli’s moving dramatic score and its magical adaptation of David
Bowie’s Abdulmajid.
Venue: Venice Film
Festival, Sept. 5, 2012.Production companies: Cattleya, Rai Cinema, Babe Films
Cast: Toni Servillo,
Alba Rohrwacher, Maya Sansa, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, Isabelle Huppert, Michele
Riondino, Gian Marco Tognazzi, Fabrizio Falco, Brenno Placido, Roberto
Herlitzka, Federica Fracassi
Director: Marco Bellocchio
Screenwriters: Marco
Bellocchio, Veronica Raimo, Stefano Rulli
Producers: Riccardo Tozzi, Marco
Chimenz, Giovanni Stabilini
Co-producer: Fabio Conversi
Executive
producer: Francesca Longardi
Director of photography: Daniele Cipri’
Production
designer: Marco Dentici
Costumes: Sergio Ballo
Editor: Francesca
Calvelli
Music: Carlo Crivelli
Sales Agent: Celluloid Dreams
No rating, 115
minutes.
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