The central conceit of Daniele Luchetti’s Confidenza (Trust in English) is so brilliant that it could spawn an entirely different story. After a rather embarrassing event in the company of other people, a woman tells her lover she wants something more, something more than romantic pleasantries. She needs something that would mean that they are bound together forever. “I’ll tell you a secret that could ruin my life”, she says. He’ll then do the same.
Is it a power move or a romantic one? Who knows. But as soon as he brings his lips to her ears and she hears his secret, she excuses herself. Something in their relationship has shifted. Not long after, he returns home to find her absent. Her clothes have fled the wardrobe. She has left him.
This is the extraordinary setup of the new Luchetti film showing at IFFR and based on a Domenico Starnone novel. The film brings Luchetti and the actor Elio Germano together once again. They have made a film that is both wonderful for how it pursues this central conceit and how it grows to encompass a life that is fictional but relatable. After IFFR, a large number of European festivals should pick it up. And although American remakes have a bad rep, Confidenza’s themes would surely work Stateside. (That the English translation of the Starnone novel was done by Jhumpa Lahiri should have some value in that market.)
We first meet Pietro Vella, the man at the centre of the pact of secrets, as a grandfather having visions of his own demise before we understand that he is on the verge of a prize to be conferred by the president of Italy. Emma, his daughter, is lobbying for her father to win but she’s informed that he’s not exactly eligible. For one, he’s no longer the most famous person with his last name; that’ll be his daughter. Also, the prize requires that a well-known student of his to stand up and speak well of him.
Well, his daughter knows how to fix these objections. One of her father’s high school students, Teresa Quadraro, has left Italy to become a well-regarded teacher at MIT. If she agrees to give the speech, the prize would definitely go to the older Vella. It seems simple enough. But is reaching out to a former student a good idea, given that children are doomed to grasp only a smidgen of their parent’s past life?
To answer that question, Luchetti intervenes, wrapping the past within the ongoing timeline, unspooling Pietro Vella’s past — his classroom career, his initial rise, his love life — as the prize’s final destination heads towards an uncertain future. Time passes by without the usual cinematic stamps. Between one scene and the other, days, weeks or years may have gone by. The dialogue is the only way of knowing what time we are in. Perhaps Luchetti believes that everyone has read the Starnone novel, or maybe he just requires attentiveness.
Whatever the case, he has made a terrific drama out of Pietro Vella’s life. The screenplay, co-written by the director and Francesco Piccolo, is wise about romantic relationships, marriages, and the wrecking or haunting effects either can have on a career and a life. It is also a smart screenplay in how skillfully it brings together that pact of secrets between lovers to collide with the presidential prize lobby.
Holding both strands together is Germano, an actor who plays flirty, scared, and charming in persuasive ways. Somehow, his face finds a way to convey an underlying unease. Maybe Pietro should have adopted the substance of a line spoken by his wife later in the film. She’s asked for a secret that would ruin her but refuses to say. “I want to keep loving and being loved,” she replies. “Secrets have to stay secrets.” Those are words to live by for any adult.
Despite the film’s general excellence, there are two somewhat false notes. One comes at the end, where the film’s juxtaposing of reality and fantasy breaks down and the clarity of scenes from the past dissolves into ambiguity. Are we in a character’s head or are we not? The indecisiveness seems like an easy way out for a film that had offered so much lucidity prior.
The other issue concerns Federica Rosellini as Teresa. There is some makeup intended to make her age-appropriate, but otherwise it is the same actress playing the character across several decades, which probably made sense on paper because Rosellini is in her early thirties. It doesn’t quite play out that way onscreen because the age difference between Teresa and Pietro is important to the narrative. Somewhere around the second decade captured in the film, the character does catch up with the actress but in high school it’s a hard sell. Her character’s intellectual precocity cannot be a symptom of physical maturity.
This last note might be trivial but the first one is frustrating for how it equivocates — as though realism suddenly becomes too slim a vessel to encompass the film’s climactic event, where it has served quite well across more than 120 minutes. That weakness takes a few points off of Confidenza. But overall, Luchetti has made a remarkable picture from a great story. He gets bonus points for featuring an aptly zany score by Thom Yorke.
Director: Daniele Luchetti
Screenplay: Francesco Piccolo, Daniele Luchetti, based on a novel by Domenico Starnone
Cast: Elio Germano, Federica Rosellini, Vittoria Puccini, Pilar Fogliati, Isabella Ferrari
Producer: Fabrizio Donvito
Cinematography: Ivan Casalgrandi
Editor: Ael Dallier Vega
Music: Thom Yorke
Production Company: Indiana Production
World sales: Vision Distribution International
Venue: IFFR (Big Screen Competition)
In Italian
136 minutes
