Ginevra Elkann's second film, Te l'avevo detto, presented in the "Grand Public" section at Rome's Cinema Festival, doesn't work. The cast is stellar—Alba Rohrwacher, Danny Huston, Greta Scacchi, Valeria Golino, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Riccardo Scamarcio—yet the film asks nothing of itself and expects us to ask nothing of it either. What is it trying to say? Where is it going?
Everyone sins. Gianna stalks a pornographic actress who stole her husband decades ago. Father Bill counsels others through addiction while drowning in his own. Caterina abandons her son and husband to alcoholism. The list continues—and no one seems capable of redemption.
Too many stories we cannot enter, and the director herself seems indifferent to their suffering. Are we all condemned to solitude? The characters wander through a Rome ravaged by December's unseasonable heat, lost, searching for something or someone. Whether they find a way out is left unclear. But given the setup, it seems unlikely.
The bourgeoisie Elkann depicts has no escape. There is, surely, more humanity aboard trains bound for Foggia. But that's another story. Written with Chiara Barzini and Ilaria Bernardini, produced by Lorenzo Mieli, shot by Vladan Radovic, and edited by Desideria Rayner, the film arrives with all the credentials to succeed. Yet despite its Altmanesque echoes, it falters. Just as the world it depicts refuses to care for itself, the film refuses to care for its audience.
Stranded among the mines scattered across the screen, Te l'avevo detto earns one grace note: Lucio, the three-legged dog. A veterinarian wants to replace him with a healthier animal, one that can do everything. But the dog returns home where he belongs—whole, not "disabled." Lucio, fragile among the fragile, seems the only one to find shelter, direction, a way forward.
In the Freestyle section, La Storia takes the stage. The first two episodes of the Rai miniseries, directed by Francesca Archibugi and written with Giulia Calenda, Ilaria Macchia, and Francesco Piccolo, premiered at the festival. Adapting Elsa Morante's 1974 novel—a work of this magnitude—could have been genuinely risky. Instead, the results exceed expectations. The narrative weaves Morante's poetry together with television's necessary demands and inventions. Here too the protagonists—Jasmine Trinca, Valerio Mastandrea, and Francesco Zenga among them—are lost. But they are lost because of history itself. Capital-H History. That "scandal lasting ten thousand years."
Racial laws. World War II. Fascist Rome. Nazi occupation. Bombardment. The raid on the Jewish ghetto. Concentration camps. Death. Then reconstruction. The effort to gather the pieces, to move beyond (yet never forget) the wounds of the past. Ida—once played by Claudia Cardinale in Luigi Comencini's 1986 adaptation—a Calabrese widow with two children, one born of violence inflicted by a German soldier, stands at the center of it all. And as the first episodes hint, she suffers from epilepsy, mistaken at the time for hysteria. Yet it is something more: a perfect metaphor for the "grand mal" that spreads from the individual to the universal. In the coming episodes, likely to air on RaiUno next spring, we will see how the story unfolds—and it touches on something else: mental distress, the asylums of that era. In Ida, after all, "reason, which had always struggled so hard to maintain itself in her incapable, timid mind, finally released its grip." Free, despite everything.