The Staggering Girl

Actress playing daughter looks fairly haggard and at most a couple years younger. This stretches credibility of the scenes together

User reviews are to harsh. The movie is beautiful and amusing even though its script isn't as good as its cinematography.

A woman (Julianne Moore) receives a call at her home in New York. She must return to Italy to convince her mother to move with her to the US She is a blind artist (Marthe Keller) who lives in a large house assisted by a caretaker (Kyle MacLachlan). The daughter is writing her memoirs, where her mother (the staggering-staggering-girl in the title?) May have a central role.

Luca Guadagnino offers us a sophisticated medium-length film with permanent jumps in its temporality and in its locations, which even overlap, with flashbacks intervened from the present; Valentino's wardrobe, Italian cityscape, and Ryuichi Sakamoto's music reinforce those dreamlike and fragmented qualities (like the title) of the story.

We witness the always difficult moment of resuming the role of daughter in person, in this case in front of a beautiful and talented mother (Mia Goth as a young woman and also Keller today) who became famous and who despite her limitations continues to create. The return to childhood at the same time as the role of an adult overextended by a declining mother. The story of both parades in front of the character of Moore and is headed towards a perhaps epiphanic end.

Great film for those who are not afraid of images doing more storytelling than the script itself. The Kyle MacLachlan character does bring to mind a Twin Peaks atmosphere and Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is just sublime to top it all off.

This enigmatic little memory piece may be only 37 minutes long but it still typifies the worst kind of art-house. A superb cast, (Julianne Moore, Marthe Keller, Kyle MacLachlan, KiKi Layne), mooch about in the past and in the present but none of them manage to engage us on any level other than the banal. The director is Luca Guadagnino and this must rank as nothing more than a doodle on his CV, the kind of film that established film-makers with too much power and money, but perhaps limited imagination, make simply because they can. If, like me, you admire the director's other work it's best you give this one a miss.