La sapienza

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.

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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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.

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.

Love is difficult enough in any language and art form, so layer a French film in a Swiss-Italian setting (Ticino is in southern Switzerland) with an architecture motif, and you have an insight into what makes it all work—light. La Sapienza will indeed make you wise if it doesn't confound you with its arty dialogue.

Most of the screenplay is poignantly presented with slow theatricality, sometimes as if the characters were in a documentary talking directly into the camera. But American-French writer-director Eugene Green brings powerful emotions out of his four principals even when they speak without an ounce of naturalism. Love is in the words aided by the light.

The middle-aged architect, Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) is visiting Ticino to study the work of 17th century Baroque architect Francesco Borromini and to be inspired. The charming Bernini would have been a better inspiration than the melancholic Borromini, but, hey, our architect captures a good vibe no matter.

His wife, Alienore (Christelle Prot), a group psychoanalyst, loves the introverted scholar even dispelling the overtures of a very young architect, Goffredo (Ludovico Succio), the purveyor of the light philosophy to her and her husband. Completing the foursome is Goffredo's pre-Raphaelite-like sister, Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), who gives Alienore more strength to love and live than she already has.

Architecture becomes more than enveloping space as it provides the angle of light to incite true love. Unsurprisingly, the loving brother and sister (close to too loving) have much to teach about the purity of love and the love of architecture. La Sapienza is a moving tone poem, albeit eccentric in dialogue and light on conflict.

In contrast with Noah Baumbach's comedy, While We're Young, which has a younger couple confounding the adults, La Sapienza is witty and accessible, entertaining and underplayed. A wise summer choice in a spectacular but droll European setting. Light even if it sounds heavy under my keystrokes.