A few quick notes:
First, as mentioned below, I’ve removed the paywall from my post on La chimera. So if that put you off reading it and you’d like more thoughts about Rohrwacher, please take another look.
A couple of recommendations for readers in New York: two shows I hope to write about, but probably won’t be able to until after they close. The first is Summer Days, a terrific exhibition of Wayne Thiebaud paintings at Acquavella (18 East 79th Street). That closes on June 14th, so get there quick. The second is an absolutely tremendous show of Peter Hujar’s work at the Ukrainian Museum (222 East 6th Street). The photographs are all from the first fifteen years of Hujar’s career, including some of his most famous hits (“Orgasmic Man,” for instance, which supplied the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life); but there are also images I had never seen before. You have a little more time to see that show: it’s up until September 1. As I say, I hope to write about both over the summer months.
Several months ago I wrote a newsletter about Jonathan Glazer’s great film / work of conscience Zone of Interest. I’m very happy that a somewhat shorter and otherwise edited version of that piece is in the new issue of The Point. This is the first time one of these Substack essays has migrated to print. Many thanks to the editor, Jon Baskin, for working with me on it, and to the fact checker for correcting a lot of fuzziness in my quotations and descriptions.
Finally, I’m sorry to be so annoying, thank you for putting up with me—but until my new novel comes out September 3rd there’s just going to be a standing reminder here that Small Rain is available for pre-order. Please ask for it at your local bookstore, or order it from your favorite online retailer. Here are a few links: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon. There are even more links at the Macmillan page.
*
I’ve spent the past few weeks being a little obsessed. Being a little obsessed is my favorite way to be, actually—not a lot obsessed, which is a torment, it knocks you off-kilter: what you feel at the start of a love affair, say, or writing a novel; but a little enlivening buzz of interest, a focus for one’s energies. The object of this minor obsession has been the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, whose most recent film, La chimera, was the subject of my last Substack (now without a paywall)—and writing about her has reminded me of the point of this Substack, which is to have something to do with my enthusiasms. My excitement about La chimera led to me watch all of Rohrwacher’s other films, which I did, not exactly intentionally, in reverse order; and also to revisit some of her influences: Fellini, Rossellini, Pasolini. Nothing gives me more pleasure than making a little achievable syllabus for myself, a tiny accumulation of things to be learned.
I loved La chimera, the best thing I’ve seen in theaters for months, but also it seemed to me not quite a masterpiece, just slightly marred—though the film is so wonderful it feels churlish to say it—by a kind of slickness, the whiffs of Wes Anderson-style shenanigans I mentioned in the earlier piece. To be clear: I love Wes Anderson’s best films, which invigorate sentimentality and raise twee aesthetics to high art; I’ll fight anyone with bad things to say about Moonrise Kingdom. But the Wes Anderson-y moments in La chimera—I’m thinking mainly of the extended montage of the tombolari during the film’s first musical interlude—distracted from, or felt inadequately reconciled to, the profound mystery that gives the movie its emotional force. I also don’t entirely love Rohrwacher’s third feature, Happy as Lazzaro, which seems to be her best beloved film here in the States and is also her film most dependent on fantastical elements. Again, it feels churlish to dwell on dissatisfaction, since the film is so much better than almost anything else being made these days, and if you haven’t seen it you absolutely should; but it felt finally to me like a character study without a genuine character, a portrait of a void.
I’ve talked before in this newsletter about the kind of prejudice built into first acquaintance with an artist’s work, the entry drug that introduces you to a new sensibility, a new approach to the world, and so carries, just by happenstance, an extra portion of wonder. Amnesiac will always be my favorite Radiohead, Rings of Saturn my favorite Sebald. But with Rohrwacher’s work that principle hasn’t held: her first two films, which have a much more roughly-hewn visual texture, and which are entirely without the fantastical elements of what has been called Rohrwacher’s “magical neorealism,” seem to me her strongest. Her second feature, The Wonders, strikes me as basically flawless; her first feature, Corpo celeste—which I watched last—is one of the great films I’ve seen. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s streaming on Amazon Prime.) This is not its reputation, exactly; the Times critic gave it a respectful pan in 2012. But reputations can be wrong; let’s correct it.
Corpo celeste is unique in Rohrwacher’s films (so far—she’s still very young) in being set almost entirely in a city. (One very important sequence takes us to an abandoned mountain village an hour or so away.) I didn’t catch, in any of my three viewings, evidence of which city it is, but reviews identify it as Reggio Calabria, on the Strait of Messina. We only see its outskirts, where the film’s twelve-year-old protagonist, Marta (Yile Vianello, extraordinary), lives with her mother and sister: a blighted landscape of highways, dreary residential high-rises, and plots of waste ground scoured by adolescents we repeatedly see scavenging trash. Early on, we hear Marta beg her mother to take her to the beach; at the end of the film we see it, and it’s as desolate and trash-strewn as all of the film’s other locales.
I wrote last time about the multiple lines of narrative energy that propel La chimera, which is part rom-com, part caper. In Corpo celeste, by contrast, there’s basically no plot. Nor is it constructed like a poem in the way that La chimera is, with its constantly rhyming motifs and images. (Corpo is like a poem in its use of nearly static, sometimes narratively free-floating lyric moments.) The density of Rohrwacher’s first feature is built up differently. Time in the film runs toward the confirmation ceremony of a group of Catholic kids, so in that sense there is a current of directed narrative energy; but the film is wholly invested in texture, in dailiness, the inhabitation of a world. Things happen: Marta gets her first period, and there’s an ill-fated trek for a life-sized crucifix; but these things don’t structure the film, they don’t contour its emotional or even its dramatic troughs and crests.
I say the inhabitation of a world, but there are two worlds in the film: Marta’s interior life, including the changing experience of her body; and the world of the Church. The film begins with the latter, opening in the early-morning dark as a congregation gathers in a plot of waste land beneath an overpass, there for an annual procession to “renew our faith and love for the community,” as the parish priest, Don Mario (Salvatore Cantalupo, very good), will say. There’s a small brass band, and a large figure of the Virgin on a float carried by a phalanx of young men. This year is special; the Bishop will soon arrive. As they wait we meet some of the film’s principal characters: Santa (Pasqualina Scuncia), a kind of all-purpose helper in the church, who will lead the children in their confirmation classes and whose devotion to Father Mario is hopelessly romantic; Fortunata, whose daughter Debby will wear the same cheesy blue dress through the whole film, her costume for a church dance; and Fortunata’s sister, Rita, who has just moved to town from Switzerland with her two daughters, Rosa, about to turn eighteen, and Marta. So beautiful, Santa says, meeting Marta and pinching her cheek, before she’s called away to a minor crisis.
The film is excoriating in its portrayal of the Church, which utterly pervades the characters’ lives. Rita lives with her girls in a Church-owned apartment—Don Mario will come by to collect the rent—and works in a Church-secured job. Throughout the film we see posters for a political candidate the Church is pushing; Don Mario is collecting signatures (it’s not clear to me for what) and commitments to vote for him. Mario is relentlessly ambitious, concerned with his own advancement above all: Santa will be tormented by his attempt to secure a position in a “more famous” church. He’s tied to his phone, whose ringtone punctuates the film, often to comic or cringe effect. Even in his one truly private scene, the one scene that explores what we might think of as his inner life, he’s treated in a deflating way: he pulls off his pants and socks, then, after giving them a sniff, seems to decide the socks will do for another day. We see him in bed, in T-shirt and underpants, briefly reading the Bible before he’s drawn away again to his phone.
Rohrwacher has a lot of fun with ecclesiastical aesthetic awfulness. There’s no Renaissance glamor here: the sanctuary is a massive impersonal marble-floored chamber, which you might mistake for a bank lobby were it not for the huge neon (neon!) cross on the wall. The confirmation classes, full of utterly disinterested, terminally bored adolescents, are a loaves-and-fishes feast of kitsch. Theological ideas are translated, with desperate, disastrous condescension, to a hapless conception of teenage-ese: “Feeling the Holy Ghost is like wearing wonderful sunglasses that allow you to see things in a different way,” their textbook reads; they rehearse a hilariously awful confirmation pop song: “I’m tuning into God, he’s the right frequency … I want to choose Jesus.” Santa in these scenes is put-upon, well-meaning, a vision of gritted-teeth perseverance any high school teacher will recognize. She’s also utterly unable to convey what the point of any of it is, to say in real and not canned terms what faith is for. In this she’s not alone. Father Mario, too, when asked about the life of faith, draws a blank. Nothing, he says, when Marta asks him what happens after Confirmation; you go to church, that’s it.
Marta isn’t having it, or not much. She’s a remarkable character, resilient, reticent, shy; though she dominates the film she only speaks a handful of lines. Her home life is fraught, though at its heart is a loving, physically intimate relationship with her mother, who elicits the only outgoingness we see in Marta. It’s only with her mother that she comes emotionally alive, letting her feeling shine out undimmed; it’s only with her mother, almost, that we see her smile. Even this intimacy is compromised, though, by her older sister Rosa, who torments Marta in the usual older-sister ways, and also polices Marta’s access to their mother—a dynamic repeated, in less dramatic form, in the family of The Wonders.
I wrote in my last newsletter about Rohrwacher’s fascination with the circulation of force, the way coercion, often encoded in systems of labor, is passed from one character to another. She’s fascinated too with the question of whether and how this circulation can be interrupted. In Happy as Lazzaro Rohrwacher presents a character who interrupts this circulation by absorbing it: Lazzaro is supernaturally forebearing, saying yes to every request, running frantically from one task to another, never passing the violence he receives on to another. I take his fate in that film to be a commentary on how feasible Rohrwacher thinks this strategy can be. Marta is unique in Rohrwacher’s films for taking the opposite tack: she’s a kind of Bartleby figure, though her resistance is even more passive. When faced with attempted coercion, she says nothing; she becomes absent; very often she simply walks away.
In fact, running or walking away is Marta’s characteristic activity, her response to aggressiveness of all kinds. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, the children’s confirmation rehearsal is interrupted by a stray cat that has wandered inside the church, creating instant pandemonium. Marta goes to it and starts to pick it up, but then seems to shy away. The cat runs off, Santa runs after it; she trips and falls. The children burst into laughter, including Marta—this may be the only time in the entire film, in fact, when Marta seems to become part of their group. But only for a moment: as Santa clambers to her feet, recovering what dignity she can, Marta keeps laughing as the other children fall silent; she becomes the focus of Santa’s anger. Santa expresses this anger in a seemingly pedagogical way, taking Marta to the front of the sanctuary and challenging her to recite “the formula,” a prayer the children have had to memorize; then she interrupts her and begins acting out the role of the priest in the confirmation ceremony, asking her questions of faith. But all of this is pretense; Santa’s voice gets more and more enraged; finally, still impersonating the priest, she violently makes the mark of the cross on Marta’s forehead, and then gives her the traditional slap on the cheek. But this slap isn’t ceremonial, it’s a real blow, transferring the violence Santa has received (the indifference of Father Mario, the ridicule of the children) to Marta; one senses that everyone, including Santa, is shocked.
Marta’s reaction is remarkable: she doesn’t respond except to stare at Santa, to stare her down; then, as Santa looks to the ground in what can only be shame, she turns and leaves the sanctuary. This is followed by one of the film’s most extravagant lyric gestures: we see Marta, from behind, walking down a trash-strewn street; a powerful wind is blowing at her back, propelling the trash in front of her. Next we see her on the roof of her building, a favorite haunt; she’s with Debby, who as always is wearing her blue dress, and who expresses her desire to become a saint so that everyone will give her gifts. I have a gift for you, Marta says, and she proceeds to cut off her hair, handing it in great fistfuls to Debby. This is a wonderful scene. Just as, in the previous scene, the bleakness of the trash-strewn landscape was transformed into an image of extraordinary beauty, Marta’s gesture suggests a transformation of violence received through what seems very much like a sacrifice.
The cat in the sanctuary presages a later scene that kicks off the film’s most extended sequence. It occurs on the morning of the Confirmation ceremony, when Marta discovers a litter of newborn kittens in a church storeroom. Santa shoos the children away, then Marta watches as Santa and the church’s factotum, Ignazio—the only figure Santa outranks—place them in a plastic bag. Iganzio rides off on his moped, bag in hand, and Santa runs after him, watching as he slams the bag against the sidewalk and then tosses it off an overpass. Santa clambers down, presumably looking for the kittens, which she doesn’t find; she ends up in a kind of concrete tunnel, approaching a body of water. We see her moments later walking along the highway, where she’s passed by Mario, on his way to collect the life-sized wooden crucifix from the abandoned church in the village where he was born. He stops and, unable to reach Marta’s mother, takes her along with him.
This is the film’s most important turn, bringing together two of its isolated figures. Mario is vexed and exasperated by Marta, who refuses to do anything he says, but he’s also concerned for her, interested in her; Marta seems shell-shocked by Ignazio’s brutal, matter-of-fact disposal of the kittens, which rips the veneer off the Church’s messages of mercy and love. They make stops along the way, at events meant to help Mario collect signatures; he’s disappointed by the paltry turn-outs. It’s at one of these stops, in a restaurant, where Marta realizes that she’s bleeding; a kind waitress gives her a pad. (It’s a nice thing, even though it seems bad, she says, trying to reassure the silent Marta.)
Maybe this is a good moment to mention one of the film’s most remarkable features, which is its treatment of Marta’s body. In an early scene we see her examining herself in a mirror, pressing her small breasts together, playing at maturity; later, in the abandoned village, the camera dwells on her crouched form as she pisses. I was struck by how transgressive these moments seemed to me, how impossible to imagine such images in a film made today, at least a film made in North America. And yet there’s nothing prurient, nothing remotely titillating in them; instead there’s an extraordinary tenderness and candor. A tenderness and candor that came to seem to me, especially as the film enters its final movements, sacramental. (I was utterly overwhelmed, on my second viewing of Corpo, to learn that the actress who plays Marta, Yile Vianello, also plays Beniamina, the lost beloved in La chimera.)
“Sacramental” seems like the right word, because, for all the tawdry, sad spectacle of the confirmation ceremony, for all the obvious failings of Father Mario and the institution he represents, the film very movingly finds its way to a space of genuine religious feeling. That Marta is susceptible to such feeling is suggested throughout the film: in her craving for solitude, her attentiveness to the world around her, her susceptibility to aesthetic feeling. In one beautiful moment, she becomes transfixed by the patterns a woven lampshade makes on the wall; she sets it swinging and watches with absorption and delight the play of shadows it casts.
In the abandoned village, Marta watches as Father Mario begins to take down the crucifix; it falls to the ground when he’s accosted by another, older priest, apparently the only resident who has stayed behind, who thinks the church is being robbed. It’s a misunderstanding, they know each other, the older priest’s anger passes quickly. Father Mario steps outside to take a call—his phone, ringing again—and Marta and the older priest are left alone together. She asks him a question that Santa had avoided earlier: the meaning of the words Eli, eli, lemi sabachthani, a line from the prayer she has memorized. It’s Christ’s cry on the cross, the priest tells her, his moment of despair—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He goes on to challenge Marta’s idea of Jesus. How do you imagine Him, he asks her. Smiling, with blue eyes, ready to hug you? Instead, he tells her, Christ is
angry, furious. He’s alone, running from one place to another. Everywhere they ask him for healing, miracles, and he runs to them all. With ignorant disciples around him who don’t understand a thing and always ask for explanations. Who don’t have a bit of imagination. And they’re scandalized.
He pulls out a copy of the Gospels and tells her to read a passage. It’s Mark 3:21: “And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, ‘He is out of his mind.’” While she reads, the priest walks out of the church, leaving her alone.
This is the first dissident Christian voice we’ve heard in the film, the first alternative we’ve seen to the domesticated, kitschified version of Christ foisted on Marta in confirmation class. The Christ the older priest shows her is a Christ who might make actual demands, who would excoriate the shallow and corrupt church from which Marta has fled. In the wake of this vision, she goes to the crucifix, still lying on the floor, and lies down beside it. In an extraordinary sequence of close up shots, we see her stroke the wood, in part cleaning it of dust but mostly, it seems, just caressing it, reverently, sensually, erotically. She touches the Christ’s face, his eyes and lips; his arms, his hands, his legs; the nail through his feet. We see Marta experience Christ, for the first time, not as an abstraction but as a reality, which is to say as an embodied being; we see her understand what the Christ story actually entails, the wonder of Incarnation and the terror of the crucifixion. “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself,” the resurrected Jesus says in Luke 24:39. “Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones.” Watching Marta stroke the body of Christ one feels that she is entering a mystery, and that we are entering it with her. It is almost unbearably moving, among the most powerful representations of religious feeling I’ve seen.
Maybe the most common criticism of Corpo celeste has been that it’s heavy-handed, that certain moments or images feel overdetermined. The best evidence for this criticism comes just after Marta’s moment with the crucifix. She and Mario are returning to the church, the crucifix strapped to the roof of the church van Mario is driving—a shot of this from behind is the funniest image in the film. Mario is in a hurry—they’re late for the confirmation ceremony, the Bishop has already arrived—and so they’re rushing down the narrow, winding, mountain roads, only a guardrail between the car and the sea far below. Marta, for the first time, tries to initiate a conversation, repeating what the older priest has told her about Christ—his anger, his incomprehensibility to those around him. Mario gets agitated; his phone, inevitably, starts ringing; for once he ignores it, turning to look at Marta. The inevitable happens: he loses control of the car, which almost veers off the road; the crucifix goes flying over the guardrail.
Narrated thus, it’s a hard moment to defend, so baldly metaphorical it interprets itself. What saves it? Its matter-of-factness, for one thing: there’s no dramatic build-up, no swell of music, just a mishap and its aftermath. This is consistent with the entire film, which has a grainy, eloquent, handheld visual style, and in which, if I’m remembering correctly, there’s no extra-diegetic sound (no sound that doesn’t come from the world of the narrative), with the exception, I think, of an eerie, low, metallic noise that we hear once each time Marta descends into that weird tunnel or underpass leading to water; I think a similar noise occurs once or twice in the tomb scenes of La chimera. But what really saves this moment is that despite this matter-of-factness, and without violating it, it gives us another of the film’s ravishing beauties, when Marta looks over the rail and sees the Christ statue floating face up in the shallow, clear water below. We linger on it just for a moment, seeing it drift back and forth; it’s hard not to think that for this heavenly body the sea is a more congenial home than the church Mario was taking it to.
Except that the corpo celeste of the title isn’t the body of Christ, or not only the body of Christ; it’s Marta’s body too, which the film has treated with such candor and such tenderness. As I experience it, the film rejects the canned theology of the modern Church for the more harrowing mysteries of an immanent, a genuinely incarnate sacredness. Marta returns to the church, she gets dressed for the ceremony in a dress borrowed from her sister’s boyfriend’s sister; Rosa has warned her not to damage it. But then she ditches, without drama or explanation: one last time, she simply walks away. She arrives again at that strange tunnel, but this time she enters the water, still wearing her dress; the play of light on the ripples her movements set in motion is another moment of transcendent, rapturous beauty. She moves gingerly, sometimes teetering, until she’s waist deep: the film’s vision, maybe, of an authentic baptism.
What is she thinking in this moment? What is her aim? There’s no way to know. Writing about La chimera, I marveled at how little backstory the film has, and that’s true of Corpo celeste as well. Something has happened to Marta’s family: they were in Switzerland for ten years, now they’re here, in difficult circumstances; something has displaced them, but we never learn what. But Corpo is more extreme in its reticence, because there’s also almost no access to Marta’s interiority. (In this it’s very different from Chimera, which shows us Arthur’s memories and dreams.) Almost always, even when she’s alone, Marta’s face is a wall, it blocks our access to her psychology. Her actions, which clearly baffle others, which maybe baffle her, too, are never given any explanation, any characterological “motive.” This challenges my sense of how narrative works. Marta has no “horizon of expectation,” which is usually so important for my sense of character; we have no idea what she wants, what she hopes for or what she fears. How can this be, when I said at the beginning of this essay that Marta’s “interior life” was one of the two worlds the film inhabits? I don’t know how to explain it (please help me out in the comments); somehow Rohrwacher generates a kind of energy out of negative space, a drama we can’t see. Marta’s blankness is never emptiness; the subjectivity is there, teeming, we just have no access to it. She’s a walled garden, a rich privacy; the film grants her an impossibly eloquent opacity.
I invited a couple of friends over the second time I watched the film. My friend Mark felt that this opacity worked because, as in La chimera (we watched that together, too), the film is so often functioning on an allegorical level; the characters are pre-loaded with meaning, as it were, they arrive already full, their meaning assigned by parable. I think there’s some truth to this. But pulling against this experience of the film is its investment in texture, its utter commitment to the real, non-symbolic world, to Marta as a particular body in a particular time and place, an individual unabstractable to any larger, predetermined “meaning.” Certainly one of the animating predicaments of Rohrwacher’s sensibility is the competing pulls of gritty neorealism and fable or allegory; her achievement is so often to find a convincing—more than convincing, a glorious—amalgam of the two.
Take the last image of the film. Marta, soaked to the waist, her dress ruined, makes it to the rocky, filthy, utterly uninviting beach, where again she finds those omnipresent adolescents scavenging the landscape. (What allegorical purpose do they serve, since they seem so imbued with meaning, repetition giving them symbolic weight: so they stand for the principle of circulation, maybe, the constant movement of material?) (Sorry to double up on parentheses, but my friend Adam felt this sequence was an homage to Truffaut’s 400 Blows, and once he said it it seemed obvious—a rebellious kid running off to the sea—but also it’s very different in tone and texture, a distant echo, nothing like the Fellini quotation [or near quotation] that sparks such wonder in La chimera.) Marta watches these kids, drawn to them as she has been throughout the film; then, suddenly, one of them is there, right next to her, we hear his voice off camera before we see him. Want to see a miracle? he asks her, and she turns. Look! It’s still alive! he says, and he opens his hands to show her a small creature, a worm or maybe a baby eel, thrashing about in his palms. He hands it to her. She’s delighted—all creatures delight her, it seems. As she shuffles her palms to keep it in her hands her face breaks into one of her rare smiles, and we hear—it’s almost the first time we’ve heard it—her laugh.
It doesn’t get any more allegorical than that. And yet, at the same time, it doesn’t get any more literal, either, any more real: two children making contact, Marta’s ruined dress, the creature squirming in her hands, her delight. It’s—perfectly, ideally—both things at once, allegory and actuality, reality and its interpretation. Is it too much to say it feels (it does feel) to me Christological? It’s incarnational in the way great art is incarnational: finite fleshly being made impossibly infinite, invested with transcendent spirit. It feels miraculous to me, it fills me with wonder. The film itself becomes the heavenly body.
As always, thank you for reading—
G.
Following in your footsteps, I now watched both Chimera and Lazzaro and will see others too - I only knew about Alice because of her talented sister Alba (fantastic in I'm Love and these films) but glad you wrote these reviews to introduce me to her work.
Garth, I really admire the zest with which you lean into your interests. Your excitement is so contageous and I've started a summer watch list after reading this post! Thank you so much for sharing your very niche finds with us!!