The Life Apart | 2024 Locarno Film Festival Review

Imitation of Life: Giordana Composes an Old-Fashioned Miracle

Music seems to be the language of the heart in The Life Apart (La vita accanto), a bizarre tale of suffering and expiation relayed with sedate repose by director Marco Tullio Giordana. Having directed a number of films over the past forty-plus years, Giordana won Locarno’s Golden Leopard for his 1980 debut Damn You, I Will Love You (Maledetti vi amerò), and has been a staple in the Italian film industry ever since. Often dealing in period dramas and coming-of-age sagas (often with epic running times, such as one of his most celebrated titles, 2003’s The Best of Youth), his latest is in keeping with his thematic interests, spanning the childhood of a troubled young pianist in 1980s Vicenza. What sets this apart is a script penned by Marco Bellocchio (along with Gloria Malatesta receiving screenwriting credit), the first time the famed auteur has allowed a narrative he’s written to be directed by another. Elements of Bellocchio’s particular forte, the significant dysfunction of family, provides the backbone of a story which deals more with miracles than music regarding one woman’s journey to self acceptance.

1980, Vicenza. Maria (Valentina Belle) has given birth to a child with a significant birthmark covering one side of her face. Her already unstable behavior finds Maria in a constant erratic state, compromising her relationship with her husband Osvaldo (Paolo Pierobon). As Rebecca grows, Maria is adamant she not be seen by others due to her ‘shameful’ birthmark, which often causes her to wake the child late at night in desperate attempts to scrub it off. As a school girl, Rebecca befriends Ludmilla, who comes from a family ruined financially thanks to her father’s infidelity. The tension between mother and daughter becomes more fraught as Rebecca learns to talk back, but when her mother commits suicide, she’s left to the care of her pianist aunt Ermina (Sonia Bergamasco), who also shared a somewhat prickly relationship with her deceased sister. Rebecca shows considerable musical aptitude, and as a teenager (Beatrice Barison) is primed to become a sensation superseding her successful aunt. But, with Rebecca receiving ghostly visions of her mother at night, it would appear other transgressions are going on in the household.

Musicians and madness seem to fit like hand to glove across film and literature, and Maria (played by the striking Valentina Belle) certainly feels like a character we’d like to know more of before her unfortunate denouement. Like Huppert in The Piano Teacher (2001) or the titular Franziska of Ernst Weiss’ 1916 novel, mother and daughter symbiosis and toxic codependency are also the foundation for Maria and Rebecca’s existence. It’s quite telling the film is dedicated to Chantal Akerman, whose attachment to her own mother was well-publicized (and who committed suicide after her own mother’s passing). However, once we get to Rebecca (played by real-life pianist Beatrice Barison, making her film debut), the narrative settles into cliched sluggishness. Despite her genius level talent, her birthmark makes her vulnerable to derision. Sometimes this comes off quite crudely, as if Rebecca’s face were as distracting as Annie Girardot in Marco Ferreri’s The Ape Woman (1964). As Maria declares early on about keeping her daughter away from prying eyes, “They bask in the disgrace of others!”

Slowly, the film’s subplots converge in a way which suggests high melodrama, but these quivers never explode as one might expect. There’s a clunky tangent about Rebecca’s grade school girlfriend Lucilla, reared by a single mother whose husband took off with a younger woman. His murder is blamed on the mother, though this is revealed not to be the case when they later reunite, Lucilla becoming a popular punk singer in the local grunge scene. The more interesting but slightly bungled divergent elements feel plucked from Shakespearean tragedy, as it’s confirmed some of Maria’s madness may have been exacerbated by sister Ermina sleeping with her husband Osvaldo. As the tightlipped but supportive Ermina, a talented musician of her own renown, Sonia Bergamasco (who starred in Giordana’s The Best of Youth) is also quite fascinating. However, Paolo Pierobon feels woefully miscast, seeing as the script takes pains to repeatedly characterize him as young and handsome (including from the adolescent version of Lucilla).

Tonally, The Life Apart is also reminiscent of Bellocchio’s 1999 title The Nanny, in which two women of quite different temperaments battle over a child. While that earlier title is set in the early 20th century, this version of 1980s/1990s Vicenza feels like an anachronism save the brief asides with the more modern Lucilla.

Where the narrative really takes a sharp left is the end of the third act, when, predictably, Rebecca succeeds at her conservatory and receives one final visit from ghost mom. A medical miracle transpires, but this feels like the moment when Rebecca’s experience moving forward would be most intriguing. Although not exactly antiquated, there’s something a bit rigid about The Life Apart begging to be loosened up a bit, lacking a certain passion from its musical prodigy who can consort with the dead and conquer her banal adversaries.

Reviewed on August 16th at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival (77th edition) — Fuori Concorso section. 114 Mins.

★★½/☆☆☆☆☆