Le sourire de ma mère

This is an interesting film which purports to show how candidates for sainthood are chosen and how related parties can have an influence. A woman is being considered for sainthood, but her son thinks of her as anything but a saint and is surprised that so many people want to make her a saint. It is because most of them have something to gain from it. Some of her relatives want her to be a saint because being a relative of a saint can have personal benefits.

The only fault I noticed is that the English subtitles could have been clearer - often the subtitles are shown a light background making it hard to read although I was able to read enough to get an idea of what the picture was about.

Eventually!!!!! That was a GOOD movie! Clever, subtle, absolutely not offensive (for anybody with a minimum intelligence), somehow delicate even! Sergio Castellito is extremely good in here and carries around this very complex character who tries to be simply COHERENT. Yes, the whole movie is COHERENT. "Coherence" and "smile" could be the main words describing this movie. Grotesque and caricature dance happily around the main character, dragging him down an impredictable spiral of absurd events, started by the almost insignificant spark of a knock on the door. The only negative thing are the two main actresses, Ernesto's wife and lover, who are really lousy. But on the overall the movie is excellent, and very well directed too!

L'ora di religione is not a beautiful movie in any sense of the word. It is dark, the shadows and lights of Rome are matched by the moody vision of the director. Bellocchio plays with images Fellini style, but doesn't focus so much on the caricature in 8 & 1/2 style, but tries to convey the ambiguity of contemporary religious life. It's the ambiguity of modernity; cell phones versus pictures of the saints, the feared "immaginette" Italian kids grew up with. Nothing can change, but so much has changed. Bellocchio's movie style is ripe with symbols: a fat Jesus crosses the road with a plastic cross. Priests in the Vatican force african kids to climb stairs on their knees: the church is portrayed to exploit the same old mother load: the poor, the weak, the ignorant, the child. At some point Ernesto, the main character masterfully played by Castellitto finds himself involved in an incongruous duel with a symbol of a past so remote it appears comical: he loses the duel instantly as the swords cross. Nothing can change. Yet we can maybe hope to keep our identity, and even if god's pervasive presence deprives us of freedom, as Ernesto's son is taught, falling in love, shouting a blasphemous curse can be an act of individuality. Or maybe not.

Marco Bellocchio's new movie, `L'ora di religione,' has one of the more peculiar premises in cinematic history: an artist and illustrator (I'm afraid he's a movie artist, whose work and life are rather vaguely and glamorously sketched in) learns that his recently deceased mother, whom he thought a bore and a fool, has been proposed by the rest of his family for sainthood, and has a good chance of getting it, and the Vatican wants to ask him a few questions about her death. The artist is stupefied and so are we. Whether we are fascinated and intrigued is another question. The other family members behind the canonization project have enough pretension and influence to want more of what they've already got, and the idea is that the secondhand publicity they'll receive through having a beatified mom will add to their social, political, and financial success. Ernesto Picciafuoco, the artist, is not only appalled by this new development, but also troubled by the simultaneous discovery of his own young son's apparent burgeoning religiosity. What follows is a meandering investigation of the two situations. Ernesto (Sergio Castellitto) looks a little like Dustin Hoffman but with more `there' there. He has to have presence and intelligence to be at the center of an examination of religion that is as complicated, quirky, and provocative as the one that occupies `L'ora di religione.' Castellitto's naturalness and humanity do a lot to make the risk of such a weird premise pay off. His scenes with Gigio Alberti as Ettore, his little son, are absolutely charming and young Alberti is wonderfully spontaneous and real.

If only the other family relationships were as natural and made as much sense. For me the movie fails to come together, partly, I admit, because the Catholic church has never been a big concern of mine, and partly because of flaws in the screenplay and the style that make the story even harder to follow than it would be anyway. Every role other than Ernesto's and Ettore's is more or less a cameo. There are complicated theological disputes that are suddenly broken off by surreal fantasies. (Bellocchio wavors back and forth between satirical realism and obscurantist hyperrealism, and the combination doesn't work well here.) There is the too-perfect and too-beautiful Diana Sereni (Chiara Conti), the teacher of Ettore's `ora di religione' (religion class), who has apparently inspired Ettore's precocious religious crisis and whom Ernesto promptly falls in love with at their first meeting. Instead of a dubious influence as seemed at first, she eventually appears to be a better candidate for sainthood than mom, just on the basis of the magical glow around her face when she's onscreen. Ernesto, with Castellitto's able assistance, despite the odd premise and the shaky plot development, continues to retain some degree of three-dimensionality throughout, but the others tend to the stereotypical. The artist's estranged wife pops up every so often only to help Ernesto take young Ettore to school, a scene that recurs with tiresome repetitiveness.

The Vatican `investigation' that draws in Ernesto aims to discover whether a brother, currently incarcerated, murdered their mother in her sleep, or, as a new rumor has it, whether the mother was awake and forgave her son for doing her in. A favorable answer to this question might tip the scale for mom from the merely super-nice into the saintly category, or from the saintly into the canonizable. Unfortunately this whole issue also strained my credulity far beyond its capacity. Ernesto's bizarre interview on this topic with a Cardinal, Don Piumini (Maurizio Donadoni) in what appears to be a Vatican dining hall for poor and disabled people, is memorable if only for Piumini's stylized manner and strong presence. (One concrete thing I learned from this movie is that Italian Catholic clerics wear the latest chic eyeglasses.)

Equally bizarre is a gathering of rightwing ideologues led by a certain Count Bulla, who challenges Ernesto to a duel. What century are we in? Bellocchio's movie is outrageously personal. In America we'd call it self-indulgent; but he's Italian and this movie is serious and intellectual enough to have been the only Italian entry at Cannes. There is a waste of skill and talent here. This is a gifted filmmaker, and these are excellent actors, and this is material of potentially enormous importance to the audience (if not to me). For some it will all work. It will seem tremendously original and thought provoking. For others it will be cause for head shaking and rueful remarks about what ever happened to the great Italian cinema of those wonderful twenty years of cultural flowering in Italy after the end of World War II. Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni: where are you now when we need you?

"My Mother's Smile (L'Ora di religione: Il sorriso di mia madre)" is a rollicking take on Catholicism that's very like how "I Heart Huckabees" treated existentialism, but with even more Tom Robbins-like absurdist humor.

Almost Kafka-like, with a touch of Woody Allen, the central character is the straight man in the joke, particularly with Sergio Castellitto's hang dog look (he was the Italian lover in "Mostly Martha") as he wakes up one morning to discover that his mother is about to be declared a saint.

We see the impact of this hypocritical quest on his ex-wife, brothers, old friends, aunts, priests and other people he has to come in contact with over two days, as everyone has selfish reasons for promoting sainthood. The potential canonization also becomes a vehicle to examine violence, sin, madness, ambition, love, parent/child relationships, philosophy, and art, as the central figure is an artist and the titular expression is captured in a Mona Lisa-like portrait.

The satire goes a bit overboard, though, when the son is challenged to a duel at dawn, though I think there was some point about the pointlessness of archaic societal rules. Small characters are weighted with too many meanings, like a crazy architect seeking to blow up a national monument that figures in a souvenir photograph, a witness whose name is a pseudonym from Dante, a mysterious, beautiful religion teacher, and more symbolism that went by, particularly as this is one of those typical Italian movies where the subtitles seem abridgments of the conversations.

In a lovely twist on the pieta, the most moving scenes are the paternal ones between father and son.

The soundtrack includes beautiful contemporary classical religious music including Adams and Tavener.