LA SAPIENZA Opens Friday (July 24) at the Kingsway. Subtitled. 105 minutes. Rating: NN
Eugène Green is an artist straddling many worlds: he’s an American who lives and works in Europe, and a filmmaker whose cinema is starkly theatrical, with characters facing the camera instead of one another, their dialogue delivered in a stylized monotone.
An earlier film, The Living World, made a virtue of its hybrid nature, taking a sort of black-box theatre approach to a fairy tale about ogres and knights. But Green’s new drama, La Sapienza, isn’t quite as successful in splicing its disciplines together.
A dissatisfied French couple, architect Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) and sociologist Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman), take a trip to Milan, where they meet architecture student Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) and his sickly sister Lavinia (Arianna Nastro).
Aliénor decides to stay with Lavinia for a while so that Goffredo can accompany Alexandre on a tour of Francesco Borromini’s 17th-century buildings. But that’s just an excuse for Green to set up a series of interwoven monologues about art and humanity delivered against gorgeous Italian cityscapes.
I really wanted to enjoy this, but Green’s self-consciously theatrical approach kept me from connecting with his characters or their stories.
The uncomplicated narrative resists stylization Green’s presentation turns everyone into mannequins, rendering their emotions theoretical.
That may well be his point, but it didn’t work for me.
