Word: giordana
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Dates: during 2005-2005
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Marco Tullio Giordana's Once You're Born, a smart, heartfelt Italian drama about illegal immigrants--which was also many critics' pick for Worst Film in the Competition...
...dire consequences from both. The film played like Fahrenheit 9/11, only cooler and way smarter. But it was shown out of competition, thus ineligible for a palm of any color. Cool is the temperature of the standard Cannes film. When a movie forthrightly engages the emotions - as Marco Tullio Giordana's Once You're Born superbly did in its story of a boy lost at sea with a boatload of illegal immigrants - the critical consensus can be loud and derisive. (Literally: the film was booed.) For the fun and frissons that are supposed to be the movies' birthright...
...Americans, naturally enough, are preoccupied with the carnage they have suffered and wrought. But conflagrations all over the world send refugees fleeing to other countries for safety, security, a little peace. There's a potent moment in Marco Tullio Giordana's Once You're Born -the Italian film that shares the Lumiere theater with Sith today -when a boat load of the dispossessed each give, in closeup, their name and home country. Montenegro, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bosnia, Sudan... The list of trouble spots could be endless; the wretched refuse numbers in the tens of millions; each face on that boat...
...first hour, Once You're Born has echoes of another Italian fable, Pinocchio -the story of a sweet-souled, rather unformed lad who is misled by two villains, has a near-death water adventure and learns what it means to be human. Giordana, whose six-hour The Best of Youth is currently enchanting U.S. art-house audiences, here expertly creates an aura of family love that any child would be sick to be so suddenly and violently removed from. Then, instead of allowing the ecstatic exclamation point of a simple, hugging resolution to Sandro's maritime ordeal, he introduces question...
...prepared for the shock and suddenness of its arrival. We're almost equally surprised when Nicola's wife, a gifted pianist, descends into the murderous radicalism that afflicted Italy during the "leaden years" of the 1970s. In tracing these two lives, director Marco Tulio Giordana effortlessly evokes many of the great events of Italy's recent past, ranging from the floods in Florence to the struggle against the Mafia in Sicily. At the same time he deftly involves us with a huge cast of characters-parents, siblings, lovers, friends. His melodramatic punctuations of these lives never jar us into disbelief...