In competition for the Golden Lion At Venice is Marco Bellocchio’s Bella Addormentata, normally translated as “Sleeping Beauty” but at the Venice Film Festival they’re calling it “Dormant Beauty”. Sleeping Beauty seems more appropriate; the story is overflowing with beautiful women in one state of unconsciousness or another and people who are trying to wake them up. Bellocchio’s famous use of powerful imagery is at times overdone in this movie, but we can forgive him in light of the compelling theme: the right to die vs the right to make somebody live.
Bella Addormentata takes the true life story of the last six days of the life of Eluana Englaro, comatose for 17 years when her family fought for the right to pull the plug and let her die and it shows us, not what was happening to this family, but to various people around her. A senator, played by Toni Servillo, who is leaning towards voting against a law that would prohibit families from making the choice that Eluana’s family made conflicts with a daughter (Alba Rohrwacher) who is firmly planted with the Catholic Church and thinks that Eluana’s family is committing murder.
There’s a doctor (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio) who finds himself compelled to try to save a drug addict played by Maya Sansa, there’s a famous French actress (Isabelle Huppert) who has left acting and practically the entire land of the living to care for her comatose daughter, and there’s an apparently bi-polar young man who angrily protests the church and its stand on the right to die issue, In the background of the Eluana death watch everybody’s tense and unhappy, watching what Berlosconi and the senate do and considering the implications for their own lives. Whether or not we are in the middle of a life and death situation, we all have our feelings about right and wrong that we’d like to impose on the rest of the world.
Bella Addormentata is beautiful and sad, but it needed an editor, because although Bellocchio is one of the greats in Italian filmmaking, he’s becoming one of its dinosaurs. While Daniele Cipri’s E’Stato Il Figlio is the wave of the future for Italian cinema, Bella Addormentata, with it’s stagey dialogue and heavy handed imagery is a ghost of its past.
Did this keep me from welling up with tears and feeling the emotions that Bellocchio intended for us to feel? Not at all. My heart ached a genuine ache for the characters and I left the theater with a lot to think about.
Bella Addormentata is intense and well made film with a cast made up of some of Europe’s best actors and although Bellocchio is a genius, this is the end of an era for his kind of film.
Director: Marco Bellocchio
Writers: Marco Bellocchio (story), Marco Bellocchio (screenplay)
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