Salento, 2017. Maria Desideria (Dominique Sanda) called Didi is an elderly heir of a noble family suffering from Parkinson’s disease. By now unable to move without accompaniment, driven by the children assumes as a caregiver Life (Celeste Casciaro), a woman of the country in economic difficulty. The encounter between the two will change the life of both.
Edoardo Winspeare, almost ten years after his shared life, returns behind the camera to stage My Life (trailer) a drama (in the hall since April 9) that revolves around the themes of loneliness and abandonment, declined in two different aspects: that of the loneliness of the third age and that of the solitude of the last of society.
The two central figures, Didi and Vita, in fact, represent two faces of a marginalization that in this similarity find a comfort, although the two could not be more different than that. Didi, in fact, is an aristocrat who lived in great homes in Sfarzose throughout his life under Nazi persecution and then that of the communist regime in Hungary, of which he continues to perceive ghosts; Life instead to move forward is prostituted and still lives with parents and the new family of the daughter in a very small apartment, unable to build a life for itself.
The film is inspired by the director’s personal events in the search for a caregiver for his mother, of Austro-Hungarian descent, but also the story of his colorful family from the mitteleuropean heritage. My life in fact condenses in the character of Didi all the twentieth century, making it a symbol of an entire century of European history.
This ambitious and interesting condensation, however, is also the weakness of the film that saturates a whole series of themes in a confusing manner without fully developing any. Between poverty, loneliness, marginalization, Nazism, holocaust, housing crisis, collaborationism and dream flashback, the script puts too much meat on fire without building an incisive and directed account.
The characters, with great potential, would benefit from a streamlinement of all these conflicts, which often make it difficult for the viewer to understand the focus of the whole narrative.
Among the strengths of the film there is certainly the speech on memory and memory of history, parallel to the reasoning on photography as a possibility to freeze time. The passion of Didi, now set aside, is transmitted to Life that behind the goal has the opportunity to actively frame and create its own reality, contrasting the passive state of its condition as marginalized.
Another interesting aspect is the love and attention of the author towards the landscape, both of the transilvano and of the Apulian one, with panoramic scenes that enhance the beauty of nature and the architectural one of the villages of Salento that become a scene of a drama strongly linked to a territory crossed by contrasts, between a nobility in decadence and the strength of the sea and the wind. The Green Film guarantee bubble makes Vita mio a work attentive to the landscape in a non-pocritical way with a respectful set of sustainability, an operation not discounted in the contemporary cinematographic panorama.
The last film by Edoardo Winspeare in the hall since April 9th is a drama with good feelings and an ambitious operation on the reconstruction of European history, but it does not affect the mark.
L’articolo My Life is an ambitious operation that does not go to sign – The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
