The award-winning movie is out on VOD on Friday but you’ll want to read the book first.
Hungry Hearts will be available on VOD June 5. It stars Adam Driver (Girls) and Alba Rohrwacher (Virgine Giurata, Bella Addormentata), who won Best Actor and Best Actress for this film at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
The book is equally gripping; I saw it as a kind of horror story, but author Marco Franzoso has more affection for the mother with the monster love.
A best-selling Italian book called Il Bambino Indaco (The Indigo Child) from author Marco Franzoso is discovered by an Italian director and screenwriter (Saverio Costanzo) , given a New York location, a top Italian actress (Alba Rohrwacher) and an American rising star (Girls star Adam Driver), and the results: An award-winning film, Hungry Hearts, an eerily engaging emotional thriller, and one of my favorites at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
The chance meeting in the bathroom of a New York City Chinese restaurant brings a young American engineer and an Italian girl working for the embassy together; a pregnancy seals the deal. But the romantic idea of throwing caution to the wind and marrying someone you know too little about is a bad one for this couple.
There were early signs of this mother’s mental unbalance; her unwillingness to eat during her pregnancy was clearly something beyond ordinary morning sickness. But starving herself is one thing; starving the baby is another. Hungry Hearts will confirm every meat eater’s suspicion that vegans are evil food haters. As this mother’s phobias and idiosyncrasies grow stronger, the father withdraws from the world in an attempt to focus on his child and protect him; but from what? Is his wife really trying to kill their child?
I had to know; so I asked author Marco Franzoso.
ILIM: We Americans have our “helicopter parents” and plenty who think that their children are simply too special for this world, but the mother in this story is on a whole new, creepy level. How did you come up with her?
Franzoso: The main idea was born from the idea of what happens to a couple that is in love when a baby enters the picture. I wanted to see how much horror could come from it, and how much my characters could take of it. Often the most tense situations bring our truth to the surface and we can understand who we are.
But I think that many of these stories that seem extreme are a lot more common than you think. I wanted to tell how much a mother will do for love when she’s away from her child and the tragedy for everyone that this can spark. I want to be clear, there are never good people or bad people in my stories. My characters are good and bad at the same time. They are human.
ILIM – OK, I get that. But I have to admit that this mother scared me!
Franzoso – Isabel (she’s called “Mina” in the movie) is at the center of the story, but she remains a mystery for the reader and for the other characters in the book. That’s why I never described her physically. She’s elusive, to the others and to herself. It’s completely opposite her mother-in-law, who is a symbol of stability, family tradition and roots.
Isabel is a kind of wanderer, without origin, and we don’t know anything about her family. We only know that she is a foreigner and she moves around a lot without finding peace.
ILIM – Were you happy with the outcome of the film version?
Franzoso – I was more than happy, I was overjoyed with the film. I was surprised when I saw it. It was very different from the book but at its heart, it respected all of the characters and tried to understand them, as I did in the novel.
On the other hand, for a film to be faithful to a book it has to betray it, it has to rewrite it with its own instruments. And (director) Saverio Costanzo knew how to do that with a lot of grace and sincerity.
ILIM – Your book was originally written in Italian (it’s been translated), and Saverio Costanza made it an English language film. Did that bother you?
Franzoso – I have to say that I always loved the diction and the way American actors speak. Their voices are different from Italian actors, they are deeper, the diction is more pronounced, and with writing like mine, dry, defined, and clear, it works very well. I think that it was the right choice. For me as an audience member, I was allowed to watch the film with a sense of objectivity and enjoy it independently.
ILIM – What do you like to read? Do you have a favorite author? Do you like scary books?
Franzoso – One of my favorite authors is Stephen King. I reread his books many times while I was writing Hungry Hearts. More than anything I love stories. I love American literature, maybe that’s what I read most often. This year I devoured The Spot, by David Means, and The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt.
I Love Italian Everything 