La sapienza

A middle aged architect and his disinterested wife take a break from their work and travel to Italy to reconnect with each other and their passions. They stumble upon an ambitious brother and sister, then respectively pair off and discovers what the young have to teach them. It studies the pain of the distance between past and present as they are the same age as their children would be. Eugene Green's idiosyncratic style immediately reminds you of the chilliness of Jacques Tati and the formalities of Wes Anderson. The characters don't exchange looks and move very rigidly, like some kind of concept theatre. They talk directly to the camera, avoiding each other. It aptly shows the disconnect they feel, but at the expense of an incredibly stilted film. Unfortunately, and while it tries for satire and wry humour with the bloated egos of its characters, the film doesn't really facilitate the joke. It could've benefited from a soundtrack rather than silence to lighten the mood.

While the characters and the film are quite pompous in their conquest; their desires, relationships and conflicts do feel organically realised in the script. The film is a robotic essay about humanity, passion, religion and happiness, full of exposition as opposed to drama. That said, it's still very interesting. It argues the purpose of grand architecture – how it's a space to be free, a space for light to enter, and that light facilitates knowledge. It's an argument between the wisdom of youth and wisdom of experience, though obvious results. With a film about an architect, you can expect great production design and it does deliver, complimented with detailed costume design, captured with its appropriately bright cinematography. But with its plodding pace, ego, and lack of emotional resonance outside of tragic revelations, it's a difficult film to feel satisfied with, though it harbours valid insights.

7/10

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This is an excellent film. I look forward to seeing it a second time as there is so much to absorb/think about. What is unique is that the director chose to not develop the plot in a traditional manner. It is somewhat of a cross between a drama and a documentary. The present day characters serve to help us understand what the director wants to convey. The rogerebert.com review and an article and review on the New York Times site are useful to read before watching the film.

La Sapienza is a film about having knowledge about the past and the present, about people and relationships, and places to achieve a better, satisfying life. It is not accident that it is about knowledge as the Italian word Sapienza derives from the Italian verb sapere, to know.

Extremely different reactions to "La Sapienza" reflect differences in temperament. Negative criticism tends to remark the film's arty pretension, lack of plot, and pointlessness. It is easy to see why someone might react in this way, because Eugene Green's movies are different from everything else on offer, including so-called art-house films. To say that his characters do not talk as real people talk is exactly right, given that Green's characters speak in the declamatory Baroque style, a style which he has been teaching these past forty years. This mode of speech is so far removed from our daily discourse that it sounds like it comes from Mars. And that's the intention. It forces one to pay attention. It takes time and patience to get used to such talk, but after a little, the unusual diction begins to make sense: it fits Green's symmetrical compositions of objects in space and the stillness that permeates all his films.

As to pretentiousness, no. Green is, if anything, modest in his insistence that there is another way, albeit one that appears wildly impractical in our materialistic present. True, his characters incarnate types that reflect ideas which he has been developing, especially since 2001, in print and on film. True, to embody an idea is to be a bit odd. Certainly this approach takes us off the beaten track. However, for those of a particular temperament, that's all to the good.

It is not the fault of an English-speaking audience, when they are unfamiliar with Green's ideas. He writes in French, as did Julian Green and Samuel Beckett. However, unlike these latter two, his books have yet to be translated from French into English.

Meanwhile, Green's movies aim for evocation. There are no car chases, no shootouts, no femme fatales, no sound-bite dialogues, no CGI, no enhanced sounds, all of which can be entertaining. Instead, there is a universe of the imagination and a particular sensibility that would have us put down our smart phones for a long moment, take a deep breath, look around, and 'regard' (recall that this word comes from French and there lies its meaning) the person sitting across from us. That is to say, to be in the moment, not becoming, but being. After all, 'becoming' will take care of itself. Being, on the other hand, is sometimes missed altogether.

The guy in this (crain graze) was about to learn: you can't run your finger along a burger during courtship and say 'i eat because i have to.' On a seperate note. Watch out if you're going to try kirks castle soap. Nearly skinned myself alive with it. Last thing. There was a nice car, a stuben. Crain wanted that car badly, needed it like he was possessed. They show him laying in bed thinking with his hands and legs strapped down.

How this picture earned 89 on the Rotten Tomatoes scale, I will never know. Except for some routine tourist videos of Italy, there is nothing to recommend here. The characters are stand-ins for ideas. The parts are not so much acted as spoken. The actors are leaden except when they are smiling, which they rarely do, and then they are leaden and smiling. There is a ton of clap-trap dialogue about light, rooms, specters, sacrifice, becoming an opposite, and the like. Death plays a part.

I gather that architecture is a metaphor here for film making. An architect's room is a director's camera ("camera" is the Italian word for "room," of course). Light enters both. The architect protagonist's musings about Borromini and Bellini, and the like, are stand-ins for the director's musings about making movies. I am afraid that none of this worked for me. The movie failed to engage, much less to enlighten.