The Staggering Girl

This movies was quite to be bit boring. Francesca decides to leave New York and go to Rome to reconnect with her estranged mother, who still lives in Italy. Luca Guadagnino collaborated with an Italian Fashion brand, Valentino. I think that this film was not quite better, unlike his longer films like Call Me by Your Name and many more, but the soundtrack was good and composed by the famous Ryuichi Sakamoto. The garments serve as a cognitive jump-start for Francesca and summon memories of a complicated adolescence, of men that have passed through her life and the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom was beautiful.

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.

Terrific cast, Beautiful Couture Valentino gowns, Visually Beautiful & mysterious.

That's where the fascination and intrigue ends. This short is very hard to follow and understand as the story makes zero sense. It would almost be better if it was silent, with the score being the only sound.

Initially I was very confused why the credits at the opening were the same format as Woody Allen traditionally uses. However, as the movie went on I started to see many similarities as Allen's film, The Other Woman.

It's a stunning film and has many of Luca Guadagnino signatures. The Italian shots are my personal favorite.

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

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.