Pretty wonderful. Italian writer/director Gianni Amelio, now in his 70s, hasn’t received the Stateside distribution & attention he’s deserved. At least, the two that have made the rounds (OPEN DOORS/’90; LAMERICA/’94) show him at or near his best. So too this deceptively simple father/son bonding story that works a double twist with Dad (Kim Rossi Stuart) just meeting the 15-yr-old he abandoned at birth when the mother died. (He’s now established a stable lifestyle with regular employment, new wife, new child.) Trickier still, the teenage stranger who’s his son is both mentally & physically handicapped. Shying from sticky sentimentality, Amelio holds to near cinema verité techniques and even more strikingly, pares expected story beats & exposition/explanations down to a third of what you’d normally get, giving the film a restraint to counter the built-in emotional arc. (Plenty of tears all the same.) Andrea Rossi, the real handicapped teen, is an irreplaceable asset as the boy going thru hospital procedures in Berlin, wandering off on his own and generally testing this ‘new’ father. It meshes strongly against Stuart’s rather ‘dry,’ slightly stiff style, growing in confidence even as he is overwhelmed by feelings of responsibility, mixed with guilt, love, embarrassment & inadequacy. And there’s an elegant turn from Charlotte Rampling, a fellow parent whose experience (and language skills) both rescue & challenge.
DOUBLE-BILL: Amelio’s LAMERICA is getting tough to find, but is worth the effort. More timely than ever in the new EU political climate.
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