Weightless

In Sara Fgaier’s Weightless, Gian (Andrea Renzi), a professor, is visited by a loss of memory. This amnesia, it is said, erases things that remind him of the woman who was at the centre of his life, his wife.

When we meet him at the start of the film, his face telegraphs a mix of helplessness and obliviousness. Later, his daughter Miriam hands him a few appurtenances of his former life. Photos, notes, diaries. Perhaps she can jig his memory, as an expert advises, but not so much as to send the old man spiraling.

Those diaries lead to flashbacks but not in the most ordered of ways. Fgaier, who wrote the screenplay, seems to want to recreate the non-linearity of memory, especially one as elusive as Gian’s. The principal material for these flashbacks is a story of, what else, a romance in his youth, with a girl named Leila.

Back in 1983, at the time when Gian met Leila met, the girl had been occupied by another; but there was enough between the pair to give the boy hope. “When I kissed you, I felt we would kiss again; it seemed impossible that it wouldn’t happen again.” It is the sort of thing that perhaps only a young man will say—his future coiled somewhere in his heart and loins. For the attractive youth, pleasure always appears within reach.

In any case, the pair separates, deciding to meet at some point, which is in turn reminiscent of Linklater’s Before Sunset. But things happen. Will the person you met that one night be the same person a year later? In two? In some ways, the story involving young Gian is refracted in the story involving his older self. Both are dealing with the memory of a woman in different ways.

This two-laned approach lends Weightless a more philosophical feel than a purely storytelling one. This reading of the film is encouraged by Fgaier’s use of archival material that doesn’t always directly include Gian. The story begins to blend somewhat into a video essay, a quirk that definitely makes Weightless the sort of film that arthouses welcome. Most other audiences will stay away, although the musically inclined will find a passage involving a pair of lovers dancing to the 1968 hit ‘Crimson and Clover’ quite pleasing.

The narrative’s semi-bifurcation also saps a bit of force from both tales, though a more generous reading of the story is that viewers get two stories for the price of one. There is a romance and a meditation on that romance. The film does open with a note that seems to tell us that Weightless is about the latter. The note is from Levels of Life, a book by the English writer Julian Barnes on the passing of his wife. One of that book’s motifs—a balloon—also shows up on the cover of one of Gian’s diaries. There are also shades of the idea in the film’s title.

But, yes, there is something elliptical, elusive about Fgaier’s first feature. It recalls Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years—even as it flips the idea of a woman discovering her husband’s youthful love. But it doesn’t quite have that film’s definite purpose.

This film, however, avoids the vast indulgence many arthouse directors seem to favour, and sometimes its elusiveness is a boon. And yet, maybe a more powerful film could be put together if the focus was exclusively on Gian and his daughter Miriam, who brings her son Elyas to his grandfather’s.

We get a hint of that possibility when Miriam snaps at her father, almost accusing him of a willfully forgetting, but the exploration of the generational effect of grief doesn’t go on for too long. Yes, that would be a different film. But the question is inescapable: Wouldn’t that be a stronger story?