Review: Luce – Cineuropa

12.08.2024 – In the second film by the directing duo Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino, Marianna Fontana plays a wonderful young woman who is coming to terms with the loss of her father

This is the Italian south, but not as one is used to: a grey winter in a small industrial town and a steel-coloured sea that one would rather stay away from. There we meet a girl in her early twenties (Marianna Fontana), which remains nameless over time Lightthe new film of the screenwriter-director duo Silvia Luzi And Luca Bellino which had its world premiere in the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival. The film’s beguiling protagonist is a brunette who lives alone and is often told to smile more. She seems like the kind of girl who has no secrets. And yet she does: she smuggles a flip phone into a prison in the hope that her father will call her from there.

If you expect a traditional three-act narrative structure and standard character development from Lightthen you may be in the wrong place. crater (Venice Film Festival 2017), Luzi and Bellino have a sensitive and generous approach to storytelling: they let emotions lead. Even when the feelings of their protagonist are largely unreadable, as in LightThe writers and directors know how to convey vulnerability in a sensitive way. Thanks to the clever script, the film never tips over into over-the-top sentimentality as it shows a daughter’s relationship with her absent father solely through phone conversations, but it’s the lead performance that gives the whole thing momentum.

Marianna Fontana is a person who, at the age of 20, already had not one but two nominations for a David di Donatello Acting Award, for her first two roles in Indivisible (2016) and Capri Revolution (2018). Her command of the screen is extraordinary; her face is a canvas for a narrow range of emotions that nevertheless cut deeply every time her eyes meet the camera. But she almost never does: eye contact would be too easy and her character is not one to assert herself so directly. This nameless young girl gets up at 5 a.m. every morning, works on the assembly line of a leather factory and soaks her sore hands in ice water every evening. When the phone rings, she is talking to a father she barely knew. Whether all this is real or imagined is irrelevant.

Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino have hit the jackpot with Fontana – not least because she worked incognito in a leather factory for three months for this role. Her visual sensitivity lets each sequence shine in a very unique light. Light is not necessarily a cheerful film, nor is it a particularly happy one, but there is so much humanity at its core. Work, longing and loneliness are present here as a triad that can hold you captive, but the film also makes it clear that there is always a way out, be it literal or imaginary.

Light is an Italian production by Bokeh Film and Stemal Entertainment with Rai Cinema. Fandango Sales is handling the worldwide distribution of the film.