LAFF 2013: DORMANT BEAUTY

Maria (Alba Rohrwacher) in Dormant Beauty.

Death panelists

By Ed Rampell

Marco Bellocchio rocketed to fame in 1965 with Fists in the Pocket, a riveting look at epileptics, and 1967’s China is Near, which daringly dealt with Maoism when this was a strictly taboo topic. The Italian director’s leftist bent was also evident in 2009’s Vincere, about the son of Mussolini and his mistress. Bellocchio is still pushing the proverbial envelope -- his latest offering, Dormant Beauty, sort of combines the searing look at sickness and hard hitting politics of his first two features with yet another forbidden subject.

 

The topical Dormant Beauty is about -- depending on your point of view -- the right to die, or perhaps, rather, the right to life. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy is torn apart by warring factions who oppose state sanctioned and administered deaths, in particular, for people in comas. Bellocchio skillfully interweaves news footage about an actual 2008 court battle involving Eluana Englaro -- a woman who had been in a vegetative state for 17 years and is about to be removed from life support -- with several private stories that are variations on the same theme, proving once again that the political is also personal.

 

Tony Servillo (2008’s Il Divo, 2010’s Gorbaciof) stars as an Italian senator, Uliano Beffardi, who decides to go against party discipline and do that odd thing in bourgeois electoral politics: take a principled stand in favor of the right to die and deciding to end one’s own life. In the process the senator ends his own political life. (At one point a protester mocks him for turning his back on socialism.) Previously, the senator’s own wife was dying in the hospital and now Beffardi’s daughter, Maria (Alba Rohrwacher), has joined the religious zealots who vociferously oppose the right to die. She has one of Dormant Beauty’s two “cute meets”, as she romances Roberto (Michele Riondino), whom she encounters through demonstrations regarding the fate of the comatose woman. Although they are on opposite sides of the issue, the couple provide the movie’s nude scene. Roberto’s brother, Pipino (Fabrizio Falco), is a right-to-die fanatic as angry and disturbed as any of the characters in Fists in the Pocket.

The sensuous Italian-Iranian actress Maya Sansa plays a suicidal thief and addict who has the movie’s other cute meet, with the compassionate Dr. Pallido (the director’s son, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio). Playing true to type, the great French actress Isabelle Huppert (1974’s Going Places, 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, 1982’s Godard’s Passion, 2012’s Amour) portrays a thespian called Divina Madre, whose own daughter hovers between life and death in a coma.

It’s an odd thing that (especially in this country) the so-called right to life movement fanatically opposes abortion and assisted suicides, but often the very same leaders and rank-and-file true believers are gung ho when it comes to capital punishment and going to war. I guess matters of life and death are like comedy -- it’s all in the timing.

Be that as it may, this Italian writer-director remains in good form and renders a trenchant, poignant, thoughtful look at this controversial issue.

 

 

 

FILM REVIEW: SPECIAL TREATMENT

Mind games

By Ed Rampell

Jeanne Labrune’s Special Treatment is in the tradition of Luis Bunuel’s 1967 disturbingly dark psychological look at prostitution, Belle de Jour. Unlike the youthful, preternaturally beautiful Catherine Deneuve’s prostitute in the latter, Isabelle Huppert -- an acclaimed French actress who has been a fixture on the cinema scene since the 1970s -- plays an over-the-hill hooker in Special Treatment. The specialty, so to speak, of her character, Alice Bergerac, is not so much in the physical pleasuring of her johns, but in role playing. Wigs, costumes, props, S&M, naive schoolgirl personas, scenarios and the like form the basis of Alice’s Kama Sutra technique.

What makes director/co-writer Labrune’s work especially intriguing is the film’s witty parallels to that other type of “treatment”: psychoanalysis. Alice’s sessions with her clients are intercut with the likewise high priced, 50-minute “hours” psychoanalysts have with their patients -- the call-girl’s form of therapy compared to that of the analysts’ “talking cure.” The role of the dominatrix is likened to that played by the analyst.

No shrinking violet, Alice goes on to have encounters with a variety of shrinks, including Xavier Demestre (Bouli Lanners), an overweight, overwrought, middle-aged  psychoanalyst experiencing marital problems with Helene (Valerie Dreville), who also seems to be in the psychiatry racket (uh, I mean profession). Xavier’s midlife crisis leads to his meeting Alice.

Although Special Treatment is about sexuality, it is not especially sexy, with little nudity and no steamy erotic scenes. It is more of a meditation on what makes people tick, sexually and otherwise. What motivates Alice and her johns, Xavier and his patients? Why does Alice do what she does and what does the 40-something whore want to do with the rest of her life? While Alice appears to be a free agent without a pimp or brothel exploiting her, she ultimately comes across as a sex slave of sorts, even if she is imprisoned by herself, instead of by organized crime. Alice Bergerac’s name is probably intended as a play on Cyrano de Bergerac, the lover of over endowed schnoz fame noted for using ruses when it came to romance.