Cinema – and the world in general – has largely overlooked the Jenisch people, a Germanic-speaking nomadic group mostly living in Switzerland, Germany and Austria who’ve been subjected to the same kind of discrimination as the Roma.
Valentina Pedicini’s 2017 film Where the Shadows Fall dealt in part with the state-sanctioned kidnapping and “re-education” of Jenisch children, but that didn’t get nearly the attention likely to accrue to Giorgio Diritti’s Lubo, in competition in Venice. It’s a story of survival in which Franz Rogowski plays the titular character, an itinerant entertainer whose personal tragedy leads him to murder and a decades-long search for his kids, and while he’s a psychologically complex figure, the film is strangely cold and far longer than necessary. Rogowski’s position as indie cinema darling will significantly help with distribution, but Lubo feels too much like a prestige miniseries cut down to feature length, and despite an interesting story and attractive visuals, theatrical play is likely to be modest at best.
More straightforward than Diritti’s impressionistic Hidden Away and once again set in the war years like his The Man Who Will Come, Lubo opens in 1939 in the Swiss canton of Grigioni (aka Graubünden and Grisons), where Lubo Moser (Rogowski) and his family move from town to town performing in public squares much as similar nomads did for centuries. The first scene is one of the film’s best, playing to Rogowski’s enigmatic charisma as he sheds a bear costume to reveal himself in a dress, flirting with the crowd in a manner that combines ambiguity with seductiveness. Shortly after he’s forcibly drafted into the army but soon learns that his three children were taken away and his wife, in shock, is dead from a fall.
An encounter with a half-Austrian, half-Swiss Jewish smuggler named Bruno Reiter (Joel Basman) offers Lubo the opportunity to escape the army when he’s offered a clandestine job helping to get some goods across the border. In a cooly-played tense night scene full of shadows, Lubo smashes Bruno’s head in with a rock, takes his i.d. and goods, and having observed Reiter behind the wheel earlier, manages to drive his car, ultimately arriving in Zurich to see if he can locate where his children were taken.
Bruno’s murder is a shocking moment, suddenly casting Lubo as a morally compromised man using any means necessary for a just cause. It’s a difficult flip to pull off, and it’s only partly successful because Diritti doesn’t accord Lubo the kind of lasting grief that would soften his character: he’s driven to find his kids but it all feels like a mission, perhaps a biological imperative rather than the heartache-induced desperation of a man who’s lost everyone he loved. In Zurich he’s able to live very well off the jewels and silver that Bruno was smuggling across the border, unaware or unconcerned that the items were Jewish-owned objects Reiter was consigned to bring to safe keeping in Switzerland. Lubo figures out where records are kept for Jenisch children removed from their families, but apart from learning that his three kids were separated and sent to different places, he can’t discover their whereabouts.
With a chameleon’s dexterity, Lubo takes on Reiter’s persona and develops a relationship with society woman Elsa (Noémi Besedes), a dilettante photographer with connections he thinks might be expedient, but her casually dropped line that the Roma and similar groups should be sterilized – she’s strangely OK with Jews – combined with her lack of usefulness results in her being ditched (in one of many plot shifts whose loose ends make one think more had originally been shot). Jumping to 1951, the film picks up in Bellinzona, where flirtatious Lubo is literally the chambermaid’s delight, carrying on a relationship with hotel domestic Margherita (Valentina Bellè).
Their love is Lubo’s redemption and with Margherita he becomes softer, less calculating. Their scenes together provide the only genuine warmth in the film, and yet the script’s new focus pushes out almost all memory of his children, not to mention the wife who never had much of a character to begin with. Instead he looks to Margherita’s son Antonio as a kind of surrogate child, but then Investigator Motti (Christophe Sermet) starts digging into the Reiter story once Jewish survivors get wind that some of their possessions were sold in Switzerland, and Lubo comes under suspicion.
Moral complexity is a fiendishly difficult thing to pull off in a film, and Diritti doesn’t manage to find the right balance, largely because the residue of Lubo’s grief dries up too quickly, but also because there are too many questions that remain. How does this Jenisch street performer who can barely write transform himself into a man at ease among society figures, with a flair for wearing the finest clothes? It’s refreshing that Diritti didn’t make a standard persecuted people drama, but by drawing the story out far longer than wanted, he loses that part of the story that gave it a significant amount of emotional currency.
Adding a creepy pedophile towards the end also doesn’t serve the interests of the story, and a very clumsy scene in a cinema with the crowd divided between Nazi-saluting Third Reich supporters and the anti-Hitler audience is just poorly staged. That’s a surprise given how in general the visuals, together with Rogowski’s magnetism, are the most notable thing about Lubo. D.p. Benjamin Maier gives it all the handsome “prestige picture” look, going easy on any stand-out colors apart from the blue Swiss sky and making the camera waltz at times, like in a lovely scene by Lake Maggiore when Lubo radiates joy upon borrowing an accordion.
Director: Giorgio Diritti
Screenplay: Giorgio Diritti, Fredo Valla, inspired by the novel Il seminatore by Mario Cavatore
Cast: Franz Rogowski, Christophe Sermet, Valentina Bellè, Noémi Besedes, Cecilia Steiner, Joel Basman
Producers: Fabrizio Donvito, Benedetto Habib, Marco Cohen, Daniel Campos Pavoncelli, Giorgio Diritti, Francesca Scorzoni, Christof Neracher, Claudio Falconi, Alberto Fusco, Andrea Masera
Executive producers: Simone Bachini, Alessandro Mascheroni
Cinematography: Benjamin Maier
Production designer: Giancarlo Basili
Costume designer: Ursula Patzak
Editing: Paolo Cottignola, Giorgio Diritti
Music: Marco Biscarini
Sound: Patrick Becker
Production companies: Indiana Production (Italy), Aranciafilm with Rai Cinema (Italy), Hugofilm Features (Switzerland), Proxima Milano (Italy), RSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera SRG/SSR (Switzerland)
World sales: True Colours
Venue: Venice (competition)
In Italian, Swiss German, Jenisch
180 minutes
