My Five Romances has really enjoyed the 2024 Italian Film Festival, which has been extended to late October in the seven Australian host cities. Take advantage! The festival is screening at Palace Cinemas and its partner venues in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Byron Bay.
Here are the best movies at the 2024 Italian Film Festival that you really should see.
1) There’s Still Tomorrow (C’è Ancora Domani)
I recommended this film to a colleague, who took her 20-something daughter to see it, and they loved. “It’s so beautiful,” she enthused. “We both had tears streaming down our faces.” She couldn’t praise it enough.
There’s Still Tomorrow (C’è Ancora Domani) is THE film to see at the festival. It beat the likes of Barbie and Oppenheimer to become the highest grossing film in Italy in 2023, and was nominated in 19 categories (yes, 19!!!) at the 69th David di Donatello awards in Rome in May 2024, winning six, including Best Actress and Best New Director for Paola Cortellesi. It probably would have won more had it not been competing with Io Capitano (Italy’s Oscar nominated film), which won seven awards out of 15 nominations including Best Film and Best Director. What a year for Italian film-making the year 2023 was!
There’s Still Tomorrow made me fall in love with black and white cinematography again; glorious black and white, or “luminous monochrome”, as The Guardian reviewer Peter Bradshaw aptly describes it. It gives the right period feel – Rome shortly after the Second World War – but, more importantly, cuts out all the distractions that colour can bombards us with, allowing us to focus on the actors’ facial expressions and emotions. And what an emotional force it is! Sprinklings of love, humour and happiness that are swamped with fear, disappointment, scorn, shame, dread, desperation, regret, humiliation, anger, poignancy, grief … until one day you can’t take it any more and you have to fight back and change things.
It’s a film about women’s liberation, both on a personal and national level, and Paola Cortellesi (pictured at top) is superb as Delia, a mother struggling to hold the three generations in their family together.
2) Parthenope
If ever a film should be seen in all its splendid glory on the big screen, it’s this one. One reviewer for Variety called it “an exquisite treatise on cinematic beauty”; Hollywood Reporter dubbed it a “lavish banquet that’s too rich to digest”. It’s long (136 minutes), it’s baffling in parts, but it’s an absorbing spectacle.
I’ve seen a number of films about Naples/Napoli at previous Italian Film Festivals, and there is even one in the 2024 IFF titled An Ode To Naples, but this is the first one that has really given me an urge to visit the city and the isle of Capri. Directed by Naples native Paolo Sorrentino, whose 2013 film The Great Beauty won the 2014 Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, it stars newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta as Parthenope – a reference to one of the three sirens in Greek mythology and the name given to one of the earliest Greek settlements in Italy.
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Pierfrancesco Favino as submarine commander Salvatore Todaro.
3) Comandante
Yes, this a World War II submarine movie, so naturally you expect it to be the usual mix of sneaky underwater operations, tailing targets, risky surfacing to up periscope, firing torpedoes and a frantic “dive, dive, dive!” to get out of danger. Followed by tense stillness: the awful claustrophobic moments of staring at the roof, dreading the barrage of a depth charge that will blast you to a gruesome death on the darkness of the ocean floor.
There will be a preamble, of course, so we can get to know and like some of the crew and won’t want them to die; and to introduce some of their wives, girlfriend and children, so we can grieve with them when the inevitable tragedy is unveiled. Comandante starts out like any good old submarine thriller (I like the genre) but all of a sudden it takes an unexpected twist and veers in an engrossingly different direction.
The story is based on the real life encounter in 1940 during the Battle of the Atlantic between the Italian submarine Comandante Cappellini and a Belgian ship, the Kabalo. What Cappellini’s commander Salvatore Todaro (played by the imposing Pierfrancesco Favino, pictured) did next is startling and thought-provoking, especially in modern times when “boat people” has become a nasty political issue.
Being an Italian movie, the film pays homage in imaginative ways to the splendours of Italian cuisine, but one of the most memorable and amusing scenes is when the Belgians give the Italians a culinary lesson. The film garnered 10 nominations at the 2024 David di Donatello Awards.
4) Gloria!
The healing powers of music buoy the spirits in a repressive Catholic women’s refuge cum music school in late 18th Century Venice. Panic spreads in the institution with the news that the newly crowned Pope will visit, and that music tutor Father Perlini should compose a piece to mark the occasion. The mean priest (played with great aplomb by the multi-talented Paolo Rossi) has a severe case of composer’s block. Stubborn and vain, he rebuffs offers of help from his pupils, who cunningly take matters into their own hands. Their musical instincts, however, lean much more to modern pop and gospel rhythms, and writer-director Margherita Vicario (who has two hit albums to her credit) happily gives them full rein. But will the Pope give them his blessing? Have fun finding out. M5R
