The Story

Alice and Mattia are two people marked by deep childhood traumas.

Alice is oppressed by an overly controlling father and an inconsistent mother.

She limps noticeably due to a skiing accident, doesn't eat, and tries to hide from her peers, as cheerful and outgoing they are, as she is closed off and amorphous.

Only two people seem to notice her existence.

The first is Viola, the unattainable girl in the situation, who decides to make her a protégé, only to change her mind abruptly when she realizes that Alice can be loved more than her despite her differences.

The second person is Mattia.

Mattia is a self-harming boy tortured by guilt.

He has to bear the burden of being the "guilt" of being the healthy twin, whom the (unconscious) parents entrust with his autistic sister, with whom he is forced to live in symbiosis, giving up a carefree and free childhood, and then the guilt of having abandoned her in a park while he tries to reclaim a fragment of freedom at a classmate's birthday party. Needless to say, upon returning from the party, there's no trace of his sister in the park.

The two meet during high school, and between them develops a not well-defined relationship, always on the verge between love, detachment, and friendship that will unite them forever.

 

The Film

Usually, films adapted from books are, in the rosiest of expectations, bland and devoid of logical sense, which only a viewer who has read the book can understand.

This film, at least partially, is no exception. The continuous flashbacks, alternating the childhood, adolescence, and youth of the two protagonists, don't seem connected, giving the whole a sense of incompleteness, intangibility, and emptiness as if not only the two protagonists were lost, but the director as well.

The performance of the two protagonists Alba Rohrwacher and Luca Marinelli (adult Alice and Mattia), Arianna Nastro and Vittorio Lomartire (adolescent Alice and Mattia) is the only strong point of the film. The two adolescents are unsettling in their immobility, conveying the typical sense of adolescent inadequacy, while the game of glances and silences between the two adult actors is perfectly bittersweet and conveys all the sense of emptiness and fear/desire to fill it.

Worthy of note is the cameo by Filippo Timi as the Clown, capable of transmitting alone the sense of terror that seemed meant to permeate the entire film.

 

The Comparison with the Book

A comparison with the book is natural.

Compared to the book, the character of the protagonists is slightly altered, Alice is more ethereal, Mattia sweeter, and some figures like Mattia's friend, Alice's husband have been completely neglected, giving more space (perhaps unnecessarily) to Mattia's mother, a calm Isabella Rossellini.

A single mention of Alice's anorexia is made at the end of the film, where we find an absolutely frightening skin-and-bones Alba Rohrwacher.

If throughout the book there’s a sense of constant depression that gives way only at the end to a slight but palpable hope that lifts, albeit slightly, the mood, the film leaves a sense of emptiness and dismay in front of the intimate and repressed pain of all its characters, making you leave the cinema with a sense of exhaustion and a great heaviness in the soul, also due to the slow pace of the narration.

 

Why I Went to See the Film

I was literally hooked by 3 simple words I read by mistake on the internet: Music: Mike Patton.

His mark on the music is felt and integrates perfectly with the atmosphere, filling those silences between the protagonists better than a dialogue, transitioning from whispered pieces to stronger and more penetrating music, which, although contrasting with each other, give perfectly the sense of the whirlwind of feelings experienced by the protagonists (keep in mind that I am shamelessly biased, I adore Mike Patton and I always get too enthusiastic when He's involved).

 

In Conclusion.

The film is certainly not boring but heavy and inconclusive, in which, as mentioned above, only the motionless and silent interpretation of the protagonists and the soundtrack can be salvaged.

To be seen after reading the book, which is decidedly more beautiful.

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