Hey folks, Harry here... I really dug Garrone's THE EMBALMER, it was pretty damn wonderful. So when Mister Sheldrake wrote this one up, my ears perked, and until you've seen my perky ears, you haven't salivated. Here ya go...
Primo Amore
March 25th 2005
Italian
directed by Matteo Garrone
Sheldrake here, reporting live from midtown in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art is running it’s New Directors / New Films series from March 23rd through April 3rd. Go to MOMA’s site (www.moma.org) to see the schedules. The programs feature new cinema by directors who’re coming to the Big Silver for the first time, and much of what’s being shown is stunning. MOMA’s on 53rd Street in Manhattan between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
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Matteo Garrone is the same director who gave us last year’s THE EMBALMER, a tale about an embalmer and his young apprentice--do you really need any adjectives to have it described to you, after that one-liner? I saw it at last year’s New Directors/New Films, and it was a great movie—creepy, obsessive, unnerving, beautifully made—and now, back in the land of the living, we have from Garrone the dark, brilliant love story PRIMO AMORE. When I say “love” I mean love in Garrone’s universe, where it is always…a problem. And isn’t always love.
The movie opens by showing us a woman getting off a bus and meeting a man at a bus station. It’s quickly made clear that they don’t know each other and that this is some sort of arranged meeting, probably an answer to a personals ad. The woman almost leaves immediately, the man seems so uninterested. But they start talking, they ask each other questions, one thing leads to another and a romance develops between Sonia and Vittorio.
At least it’s a romance as Vittorio thinks of it. How does he think of it? He’s an artist, a goldsmith who melts down gold then cuts away everything that doesn’t look like a whale. But he has neurosis that makes it hard for him to break out of that mindset when dealing with intimate relationships, and this has resulted in his employing a failed strategy in his relationships with women. The strategy has been this – find a woman with a great body, hope the mind follows. Early in the film, when he sees Sonia modeling in an art class, he has a revelation: hey, her body’s not perfect, but her mind’s great; so: a few pounds here, a few pounds there. IT….COULD….WOOOORRKKK!!! Cut away everything that looks like a whale (though he’s canny enough never to express it to his girlfriend using those precise words). Brilliant…and maaaaaaaaaaaaaaad!
The method he uses to pare away parts of his girlfriend is starvation disguised as dieting. This movie plays out like one of those misogynistic jokes that end, “everything would be fine if SHE WOULD JUST @^#$#!@ DO WHAT I @^#$#!@ TELL HER TO DO,” but it’s all done in that cool, stylish Italian way that Woody Allen parodied in EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX ETC. Not knowing the direction the movie would take, until about a quarter of the way through I thought it was one of the most perfect and charming little date movies I’d ever seen, and Vittorio’s drift towards obsessive madness begins so subtly that you almost don’t notice when the thing shifts gears – and then you wake up and find yourself in the same room with a monster.
In PRIMO AMORE love is a disguise to hide Vittorio’s compulsion to shape the world and his relationships according to a single model, that of the artist. Insofar as he succeeds, he makes worse his monstrosity. It’s a great movie, beautifully shot, acted and directed. It will creep you out and the ending’s payoff will have you shouting “All right! About TIME!” Go see it.
