I can’t get enough of Donatella Finocchiaro. Starring in movies like this year’s Italian submission to the Oscars, Terraferma, Marco Bellocchio’s Sorelle Mai and The Wedding Director, Donatella is clearly one of the most talented actors, male or female – and you’ll notice I didn’t qualify that with an “in Italy”. In a celebrity death match with Julia Roberts, as an example, Donatella Finocchiaro would wipe the mat with her.
Even in a flawed movie like I Baci Mai Dati (Lost Kisses), Finocchiaro takes hold of her character and makes the film better than it would have been without her.
Lost Kisses, directed by Roberta Torre, (Donatella starred in her 2002 movie, Angela) is fun and creative but misses the target – to be honest, I’m not exactly certain which target she was shooting for. It’s the story of 13-year-old Manuela, played by newcomer Carla Marchese, who talks to the Madonna in her sleep, or maybe she doesn’t. Whether she’s making it all up or there is something spiritual going on, the people in her dismal neighborhood in Catania, Sicily, have been waiting and praying (and willing to pay) for someone like her to come along. When one of Manuela’s dreams helps the town restore a broken statue of the virgin mother, so many people start knocking on the family’s door looking for divine intervention from Manuela that Manuela’s mother, Rita (Finocchiaro) posts the hours of operation on their front door.
Rita is enjoying the donations and Manuela is going along with it, for reasons that remain unclear to me, even when they burn her typical teenager clothes and dress her up like a kind of modern nun. I’d like to understand better what Torre wants us to see when Manuela is listening to her visitors’ requests for help (for more money, for a husband to disappear, for a chance to be on Italy’s Big Brother program). She doesn’t strike me as the kind of girl who is just so used to doing what she’s told that she can’t say “no” to her mother. Finocchiaro as the “not exactly mother-of-the-year” Rita is manic and hilarious and Carla Marchese is talented beyond her years as Manuela, but I don’t understand their relationship at all.
I don’t need to know if there is really a miracle going on in this movie, but I would have liked to understand better what everybody was thinking as they were participating in it. There was no question how her father felt, when he visited Manuela in her “office”, the room that Rita had fixed up to recieve the masses. He was clearly as confused about what was going on as I was. And the supplicants, their desperation and hopes were obvious as they put their faith in this 13-year-old “saint”.
Lost Kisses will probably never be available in the US, but if you can get your hands on a European copy. It’s visually stimulating with avant-garde touches here and there and I think it is worth watching. It opened the Controcampo films at the Venice Film Festival and won the “Brian” award (I can’t honestly say I know what that is), was nominated for the Nastro d’argento, and was screened in competition at Sundance.
I Love Italian Everything 