S.second Italian film in competition and, like Bones and All, another film shot by an Italian in America.
Andrea Pallaoro, however, unlike Guadagnino, who yesterday declared that he had waited to have a sufficiently mature look before tackling the American landscape, lives there in America. His gaze formed between New York and Los Angeles and in rural America he had set his first feature film, Medeaspresented in 2013 in Venice in the Horizons section.
From Euripides to melodrama: already the second film, Hannah2017, Volpi Cup to Charlotte Rampling, decreed the choice. Also Monica it is a melò, cooled and silent, organized with great economy of gestures, a phone call, the lipstick put in front of the rearview mirror, a beer drunk by the edge of a weed-infested pool, a tear that falls on the pillow.
Monica, a “hot” girl
Monica is a “hot girl”, so the man off screen describes her as he offers her to polish the red convertible in the first scene of the film: “a hot car for a hot girl”. Monica (Trace Lysette) is really beautiful and the gaze with which the director frames it is the loving one of aware authors and pleased to have found the perfect interpreter for their story. Written with Orlando Tirado, co-author of Pallaoro from the very first short film, the story is the simple and universal one of a homecoming.
The journey to the home of a woman born a man
Monica’s trip to visit the sick mother (Patricia Clarckson, magnificent) and seeing the place where she grew up with another name, and as a boy, is long and painful. The time elapsed and the change did not allow the mother to recognize that child abandoned many years earlier at the bus station “only 5 minutes before departure so that there was no time to talk”. Only one sentence had been uttered: “I can no longer be your mother”. But that ruthless sentence contained within it the details of the appeal. And Monica, that on the journey he still experiences two painful refusals – that of the man she loves, indifferent to the heartfelt messages she leaves on his answering machine, and that of an occasional meeting that will not take place and will produce another short monologue: “I’m not your experiment!”, he embraces again with a single gesture, a caress, past and present.
It is always possible to go home, Andrea Pallaoro tells us. It is always possible to mend what was frayed, and, indeed, the return opens up new scenarios. A family that was not there and that was formed in the absence. And a renewed sense of belonging. Which The Star-Spangled Banner, the anthem of the United States of Americasung with the uncertainties and fears of a child, it is the soundtrack.
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