24/02/2009

Giulia, sentenced to prison for a crime of passion, teaches swimming at a pool in the hours of partial leave conceded her. Guido is a successful and married writer grappling with feelings of futility about his profession. They have a fleeting affair based on abdication, fragility and selfishness in Giuseppe Piccioni’s latest film, Giulia Non Esce la Sera [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“Giulia Doesn’t Go Out at Night”).

Water is an indispensable part of life for Giulia, an amniotic fluid that offers her only possible freedom. For Guido is it something on which to float like a buoy, surviving by going adrift while all time while thinking he’s a lifesaver for others.

As Giulia, Valeria Golino brings great sensitivity to her role, and great depth and vulnerability to a woman forced to renounce everything, from her daughter’s love to the new man in her life. Valerio Mastandrea, as the intellectual in crisis, suffers somewhat by a script (written by the director and Federica Pontremoli) that repeats itself and gets tangled up in that genre of dramatic cinema sprinkled with neurotic, bitter humour of which Nanni Moretti is master.

The characters from Guido’s stories mix with real characters – Guido’s wife (Sonia Bergamasco), editor (Piera Degli Esposti) and daughter (Domiziana Cardinali), and Giulia’s daughter (Chiara Nicola) – in a story that is well-photographed by Luca Bigazzi and well-edited by Esmeralda Calabria. The end is somewhat slow and is topped off by a closing song by the group Baustelle, sung by Valeria Golino, which resembles "If You Want Me" and "Falling Slowly" (2008 Best Original Song Oscar winner) from the soundtrack of Irish film Once [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

Produced by Lionello Cerri for Lumière & Co., with RAI Cinema, the film will be released this Friday on 181 screens by 01.

(Translated from Italian)