Friday, March 24, 2006
Movie: "Don't Tell" (La Bestia Nel Cuore): Italy's Foreign-language Oscar submission
The ANNOTICO Report
Don't Tell, was Italy's submission for the foreign-language Oscar
Don't Tell (La Bestia
Nel Cuore)
Stars: Giovanna Mezzogiorno,
Alessio Boni, Stefania Rocca, Luigi Lo Casio
Director: Cristina Comencini
Distributor: Lionsgate
Films, Rating: R for
sexual content, nudity, language and a brief violent image, Running time: 2 hours
Now in select market
'DON'T TELL' (THE BEAST IN THE HEART)
USA TODAY
By Claudia Puig
March,23, 2006
Don't Tell, Italy's submission for the foreign-language Oscar, has strong performances...
Giovanna Mezzogiorno plays the sweet-natured Sabina, an actress who dubs horror movies. Her contented life is suddenly upset by lurid nightmares, triggered by having retrieved the cremated remains of her dead parents.
She begins to examine her past and realizes she has no real memories of her childhood.
"It's like it never existed," Sabina tells a friend. "I wonder how I erased them this way."
A lifelong friend, Emilia (Stefania Rocca), tries to fill in the blanks and tells her how she enjoyed the calm at Sabina's house and the pleasant, if remote, demeanor of Sabina's parents, both schoolteachers.
But the placidity masked terrible behavior that begins to surface in Sabina's dreams, upsetting her relationship with her boyfriend, Franco (Alessio Boni). She visits her estranged brother (Luigi Lo Cascio), a university professor who lives in America, in an effort to sort out her troubled and dim memories, which hint at childhood abuse...
There is a subplot involving Emilia and Maria, Sabina's boss (Angela Finocchiaro), that leads to a lesbian love affair. The fiftyish Maria was dumped unceremoniously by her husband for a woman her daughter's age.
It's unclear what that point has to do with Sabina's memories of abuse, but it seems to have something to do with the film's original Italian title: "The Beast in the Heart.". Is writer/director Cristina Comencini theorizing that most {people) have a beast in their hearts that manifests itself in different ways?
Another subplot that doesn't seem to go anywhere involves Sabina's boyfriend, Franco, and his friend, a schlocky TV director and Kevin Smith look-alike (Giuseppe Battiston).
Franco struggles with his own "beast" and has a one-night stand with a co-worker.
It's as if the film is trying to be a light ensemble drama and a deathly serious tale of repressed childhood trauma as well as a commentary on lust. These disparate elements ultimately feel jarring, as if this were several separate films trying to meld into on
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