NON TI MUOVERE (Don't Move): Have You Ever Watched a Tom Cat "Make Love"?
Written: May 06 '05 (Updated May 09 '05)
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Pros: Penelope Cruz, Sergio Castiletto's direction; performances; passions; Gianfilippo Corticelli's Photography, Patricio Marone's Production Design
Cons: The Plot, sense of male chauvinism; ending taste of religiosity which is absurd, unconvincing.
The Bottom Line: DON'T MOVE is a well-crafted adaptation of a popular Italian novel. It tells an interesting, often passionate, sometimes brutal story, which is brought down by sentimentality and religiosity.
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| macresarf1's Full Review: Non ti muovere (Don't Move) |
Can there be anything so wrenching for a mother as the death of her son? For a father, the death of his daughter?
They deserve our greatest respect and sympathy.
Margaret Mazzantini's acclaimed Italian novel, Non Ti Muovre (Don't Move), dealt with the reflections of a father, a surgeon, waiting to learn if his daughter will live or die after an accident. For all his apparently successful middle class professional life, he is a son of the working class, a child of abusive parents, an orphan saved by the equivalent of "afirmative action"; a man who has led an imperfect, troubled life; and so he has much to reflect upon. Novelist Mazzantini dedicated her book to "Sergio."
As it happens her husband is Sergio Castelitto, a veteran actor (MOSTLY MARTHA, Nettelbeck, 2001; and 54 other films). He not only directed the picture (a second effort), but collaborated with his wife on the adaptation, and he stars in DON'T MOVE.
That complicates things a bit.
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What if the Movie's protagonist, Timoteo (Castelitto), as other surgeons open his daughter's skull, is reflecting upon the rape that he perpetrated on a country girl, Italia (Penelope Cruz), many years before?
That is a crime and, despite the protagonist's failed Catholicism and professed atheism, in the view of a Catholic viewing audience, the unconfessed act must be seen as a mortal sin.
What if he had an intelligent, talented, beautiful, doting, well-brought-up wife, Elsa (Claudia Gerini, THE PASSION OF CHRIST), at home?
That vitiates much sympathy for Timoteo in his current tragic predicament.
What if the rape inaugurated an obsessive, destructive relationship, which saw the surgeon continue to rape the depressed country girl Italia, and gradually, led him to pay her for her forced services, as if she were a wh*re? And then, what if he flaunted the affair before his colleagues? What if he daringly left statements plainly in front of his wife about what he had done, what he was doing, hoping she might notice? What if he wanted, subconsciously, to be found out and humbled? What if, worse yet, he did not care if his wife discovered his sins or not?
Is this man a sociopath? No . . . a psychopath?
What if the relationship developed into a power-driven, sick, selfish, disastrous love affair which continued for several years?
Until he got both his mistress and wife pregnant, at the same time?
What kind of despicable fool is this?
[Actually, I've known several men almost as rotten in their relations with women as Timoteo.]
And what if Timoteo encouraged one of the women to abort her baby? And what if the other child is now the 15 year-old daughter who lies near death, in the hands of other surgeons, a few feet away?
Now that really complicates things!
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What if DON'T MOVE urges us to have our primary sympathy for Timoteo, the well-off surgeon?
This film is one in which excellent actors struggle to help their characters overcome a wildly distasteful and melodramatic, soap operish plot. And in the end, how you accept DON'T MOVE depends upon your indulgence of a climactic . . . Deus en Sentimentalis.
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DON'T MOVE begins in a driving rain, with a striking high overhead shot of a Rome street and the Vespa accident which has badly injured the head of the teenage girl, Angela (Elena Perina), the surgeon's daughter. The camera descends to close focus on an unstrapped red helmet lying on the macadam, and we follow the girl in an ambulance to a hospital, and watch doctors performing heroic efforts to stabilize her enough to go in by a craniotomy, to relieve a blood clot pressing on her brain. A weary surgical nurse, leafing through the girl's retrieved notebook identifies her as Angela, daughter of a colleague (Timoteo) who is also a friend from the past. Timoteo happens to be in another operating theater nearby.
She goes to summon him, and a few minutes later, as he stands helplessly, waiting, looking out a window at the rain in the courtyard, he begins his ruminations:
It began on a hot, sweltering summer day nearly twenty years before, when Timo, as people call him, had car trouble on the outskirts of Rome. In his rumpled dark suit, with his shambling gait and awkward, uncommunicative manner, he did not command much respect asking for agua naturale at the cafe he walked to, though he had hoped to find someone there to fix a car. A young worker, Italia (Penelope Cruz), a transient immigrant, originally from Albania, showed compassion for his situation; and from her hovel-like living space, let him phone a mechanic; and then Wife Elsa (on holiday, at their beach villa). Elsa was not in, as it turned out, and Timo had to wait for the mechanic at the cafe. He was encouraged to buy a few drams of vodka; in fact, given an extra one, on the house, when the mechanic at last appeared.
Timo returned to Italia's old burnt-umber house of flats (almost surrounded by a half-finished, soulless modern new development) to try to phone his wife again, but something overcame him, and before he could stop himself, he crudely, very much like a tom cat, took the barely resisting young woman, almost gripping her throat in his teeth.
Now that I've described Timo's crime in some detail, there is very little more to be said except that he does it again and again, over months and years. And amazingly, Italia begins to like it; begins to take care of Sergio, to cook spaghetti for him, bake him simple breaded rice balls. There is an explanation for Italia's affection, the hint of a motivation for Timo's recklessness . . . .
But the story at this point, the more I thought about it, reminded me of a male wish-fulfillment.
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That is not to say that Writer/Director/Star Castelitto, his crew, and his cast -- especially Penelope Cruz -- are not skillful in encouraging us to suspend disbelief.
Castelitto manages to be at once the haggard, exhausted middle-aged surgeon and his imperious younger self, always projecting an essentially selfish man, who understands nothing of his feminine side, and little about women. Claudia Girini epitomizes the modern, patrician Roman beauty, the perfect expected wife, who prepares exquisite nova cocina, flies off to Berlin on journalistic assignments, yet seems to sense what is going on; but submits at the beach villa to rabid naked sex, face down, on a table covered with loose seashells.
And Penelope Cruz is something of a revelation. In this film, she is not the voluptuous beauty of early films, not the spunky heroine of her latest outing, *SAHARA, but a slack-jawed, overly made-up, languid, very troubled, earthy proletarian woman. Yet she conveys her character's human despair, her love, her angry reaction at betrayal, her acceptance. She has been compared in DON'T MOVE to Giuletta Masina, Fellini's great waif star/wife (NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, 1957). Possibly.
Her performance is reason enough to see DON'T MOVE.
Castelitto's direction is sure, his collaboration with his wife on the screenplay dramatically sound. Despite the drawback for non-Italian listeners of sometimes angry, growling soundtrack songs (beloved by Italia) featuring Italy's leading rocker, Vasco Rosseli, DON'T MOVE's story often has us in its thrall. And Gianfilippo Corticelli's cinematography, Patricicio Marone's editing, and especially, the production design of Francesco Frigeri (MALENA, 2000) are impressive.
Yet, a suggestion of Divine Intervention sentimentalizes what is, at its best, a very stark presentation of a complicated, dysfunctionally ugly, tragic relationship.
Recommended for that skillful presentation -- but not for its tidy denouement.
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For a review of a movie mentioned above:
*SAHARA --
http://www.epinions.com/content_176667725444
Recommended:
Yes
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macresarf1
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Location: San Francisco, Ca.
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11/7/09: Another Bloody November.
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