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Sacred Heart
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In a 2005 article with the disarming title of “Stuffed Cinema”, Italian critic Eugenio Renzi asked some tough questions about his nation’s filmmaking output. While “Italian people live and die in the most vile state of social brutishness since fascism” and “proletarians sacrifice their lives to a void of base consumerism”, where are the directors who are willing to tackle direct, angry, provocative stories about this woeful state of affairs? Moreover, Renzi asks, who is going to save audiences from “the insipid swamp of bourgeois psychodramas in which Italian cinema is floundering”? (He’s no fan of Nanni Moretti in the 21st century, as you may gather.) The Italian films we get to see in Australia – rarely on arthouse release, occasionally in small festivals – tend to be drawn, more than they should, from the glossy, commercial end of production. Inevitably, there is no shortage, in this situation, of those bourgeois psychodramas that Renzi scorned – films in which well-off characters struggle with malaise in their interpersonal relationships undergo some form of “crisis of conscience” in relation to the wider problems of society. Sacred Heart, directed and co-written by Ferzan Özpetek (Facing Windows, 2003), is a model example. A cold, corporate type (well played by Barbara Bobulova) is disturbed when several victims of her capitalist scheming kill themselves. This precipitates the heroine’s journey into her past (as she sorts through the belongings left by her apparently mentally ill mother), and into an underworld she has never known – embodied by a sprightly, pouting street kid, Beni (Camille Dugay Comencini). The film is professionally made and easy to watch. But its treatment of social issues and their impact on intimate life is superficial, at best. Dramatic clichés and facile appeals to feel-good emotion replace real analysis and dramatic complexity. © Adrian Martin October 2005 |
