La balia

At the turn of the 20th century, a wealthy doctor who specializes in mental health has a child with a wife who goes into a post-partum depression, and can't feed their newborn son. So he hires a wet nurse, an illiterate, but emotionally intelligent poor woman, who agrees to leave her own son, fathered by her lover, a communist now in jail, to care for the doctor's boy. What ensues is a subtle study of how the addition of this woman to the household changes all the dynamics; parental, sexual, emotional. Intense, but more understated and less theatrical than most of Bellocchio's films, this felt a lot like Bergman to me, with many quiet scenes relying on close-ups and studying the small changes on human faces that often mean so much. Driven by excellent performances this is a quietly haunting film.

I saw this movie in a EU film festival in Vancouver last year and was deeply moved. Quite unlike most other realistic Italian films, the film is a a "sober, unerringly controlled psychological drama about motherhood and mental frailty" (David Rooney, Variety). A Roman psychiatrist hires an illiterate country girl to serve as a wet nurse for his newborn child when his wife is unable to breast feed (or love) it. The maternal theme (and frequent nursing scenes) contribute welcome warmth to the director's customary rich visual style, while the plot points the wet-nurse has a jailed political activist husband and a small child of her own whom she must temporarily forsake in order to earn a living. It is an elegant film with slow rhythms, poetic psychoanalytical discourse and warm motif of maternity, loyalty, love and understanding. Beautiful and compassionate Italian masterpiece in the 1990's!

Lovers of Hollywood blockbusters beware: 'La Balia' is a distinctly European film, and an old-fashioned one at that. This is not to say it's a bad film. Quite on the contrary; it's excellent. It's slow-paced without being long-winded, subtle without being elitist, understated without being incomprehensible, and ever so elegant. This is particularly true for the love scene that highlights the final third of the film. No gratuitous nudity and full-on sex in this film; instead you get an older man teaching his uneducated wet nurse how to write and looking at the way she holds her pen in a way that just sizzles with passion. It's an old-fashioned way of depicting lust, but it's more erotic than any 'steaming' sex scene Hollywood could concoct. And that's just one of the many instances of understatement that make this film so impressive.

The acting, too, is top-notch - subtle but ever so effective. None of the three leading characters (the doctor, his wife, and their wet nurse) undergoes much development, but somehow the actors (particularly Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as the frigid wife with the smouldering passion underneath) give one the impression they do. It's an achievement not to be underestimated.

Of course there are things the makers of this film could learn from Hollywood, one of them being how to use lamps. The first few minutes of the film are so dark (one can barely see facial expressions) it makes one wish the job had been done by a Hollywood crew. Once one gets into the story, however, the natural light and gaslight become a part of the experience, making for an authentic nineteenth-century Italian atmosphere. And then some.

Highly recommended to those who like subtle-but-easy-to-follow arthouse films.