Screening: Friday 17 November, 13.30 and 18.00, NFT
Mario Martone's new effort is no less impressive than his highly acclaimed first film, Death of an Italian Mathematician. Once again, he seems to be engaged in the investigation of a death, but again, it takes only a few sequences to realizes this is no thriller at all, but a confrontation between two opposite characters so close to each other that in spite of their differences, they could be facets of one and the same person.
A Bolognese woman arrives in Naples to attend her mother's funeral. The body of the older woman was pulled out of the sea, wearing only a red bra, strangely unfit for her age. The daughter, trying to understand what happened, embarks on a long and painful emotional journey, taking her through childhood traumas and compelling her to review her entire past and her relationship with her mother. The mother, Amalia was a sensual, vivacious and lively character whose death premonitions never marred a sunny disposition. Delia, her daughter, presenting a respectable, moderate exterior, was always repressed, melancholy, afraid of her own feelings. The man between them was Amalia's lover, a lascivious, unscrupulous hedonist, whose conduct determined the rapport between mother and daughter. Delia, as a little girl, wiped out of her mind the memory an act of violence she had been submitted to by an old satyr, imagining instead her own mother taking her place and enjoying the act which had marked her forever. One more reason to interpret the film as a portrait of opposite traits in one character.
A mature and unusually powerful picture, l'Amore molesto finds Martone in full form, mastering his material with a sure hand, helped by the remarkable performances of his two actresses, Angela Luce as Amalia and Anna Bonnaiuto, playing her daughter. The exceptional sountrack combines live effects with ethnical music, and Martone, who shot the film in the streets of Naples, creates an incredibly authentic atmosphere - offering a pulsating, generous, violent and even threatening image of this city that is "more real than real". As for Luca Bigazzi's camerawork, it is the epithome of sophistication, perfect in its simplicity.
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