An elderly German artist, Ernst Bollinger (Maurizio Soldà), is joined by his wife Helena (Tiina Helina Hallikainen) in a hangar-museum in a lagoon area in northeast Italy, where he’s preparing what’s set to be his last work. But Helena suddenly disappears, while in the company of Adrien (Fabrizio Falco), a young writer who’s penning a biography on Bollinger. Thus begins the story of La memoria del mondo [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], Milanese director Mirko Locatelli’s fourth unique film which is hitting Italian cinemas on 2 March, distributed by Officina Film, following a stint in the New Worlds section of the 40th Torino Film Festival.

The story is told in the first person from the viewpoint of the writer whom we see recording his ideas on a tape recorder in somewhat pompous and - despite Adrien’s young age - totally outmoded prose, as if he were suspended in time. But, as it happens, time, memories and nostalgia are at the heart of the film’s reflections. Bollinger is obsessed with a place from his childhood where he used to play during the summer holidays. It’s a village now submerged by water, and the artist is taken out on a tour of the surrounding area by a local youngster called Giulio (Fabrizio Calfapietra), who drives a motorboat. Adrien, meanwhile, reflects upon the past, and in one emblematic scene we see him as a child.

The film’s visual aspect is magnificently composed, with aquatic motorways shot superbly in HD 4K by Paolo Rapalino, using natural light in its various forms (including several tricky night-time shots) inspired by Italian naturalistic landscape paintings of the 19th and 20th centuries, where muddy atmospheres are reproduced using shades of grey and blue. Footage shot using Bollinger’s subjective old camera, meanwhile, are shot in Super 8. The sound, which is recorded live by Mirko Guerra and Sonia Portoghese, conveys birds chirping and motorboats purring as they glide across the water, atop the silence of the lagoon (the film was shot on the Isonzo - Isola della Cona and Isola della Valle Cavanata Estuary Nature Reserve). The film’s score plays an important role in the movie: the melodious strings of composer Marco Robino, who draws on eighteenth century baroque, speaks to the melancholy of nature and of the film’s protagonists. The attention paid by the director and set designers (Luigina Tusini and Elisabetta Ferrandino) to the artistic set-up of the penultimate scene is equally appreciable.

Clearly Locatelli has developed his expressive potential. But when it comes to the screenplay, which was penned by the director alongside Giuditta Tarantelli, we’re slightly more confused. The film’s narrative development is as simple as it is metaphorical. Whilst looking for the submerged village and the missing woman, the three characters end up stuck in the middle of the lagoon after Giulio’s motorboat malfunctions. Nature and night-time envelop them, the cold begins to bite, and they see a line of migrants in the darkness, like silent ghosts, making their way towards an unknown destination. The three of them are ultimately experiencing the same alienating conditions as human beings on the run, but rather than exploring the migrant theme in any real depth, it’s deliberately left up in the air. Erudite Adrien cites Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin’s The Sacred Wood, but he mostly refers to the “Wanderer Wanderung” of the great German romantic imaginary. And these educated references, expressed with a certain level of self-satisfaction, work to dampen the film’s narration, add a sluggish air, and will remain inaccessible to most segments of the audience.

La memoria del mondo is produced by Strani Film together with RAI Cinema.