waiting on the dead
by Douglas Messerli
Giacomo Bendotti, Ilaria Macchia,
Andrea Paolo Massara, and Piero Messina (based on the play La vita che ti diedi by Luigi Pirandello), Piero Messina (director)
L’attesa (The Wait) / 2015, USA 2016
Arriving in the midst of the gathering, Jeanne seems to have no
comprehension as to what might be going on. Straining credulity, director Piero
Messina simply provides her a room and the handyman’s explanation that Anna is
not feeling well.
The following morning Anna explains that it was her brother who has
died, the first of many lies she tells the innocent girl. But the worst of her
lies, which both her sister-in-law and handyman cannot forgive her, is that
Giuseppe is simply not there yet, and will probably return in time for Easter
celebrations.
So begins Messina’s beautiful and somewhat haunting film, where, for
reasons of her own, Anna keeps the young Jeanne on in her villa, cooking for
her and even for two local boys whom Jeanne casually encounters in the nearby
lake.
In part, of course, the truly devastated mother simply must have someone
young around her, and by entrapping his son’s girlfriend she clearly,
psychologically speaking, believes that she still controls a part of Giuseppe’s
life. If her refusal to face the truth is, at first, rather unbelievable, we
gradually come to perceive the kind of Oedipal relationship she had with her
son, as Binoche stunningly peers off into space, sucks the air out of a small
inflated sunbed (presumably her son had blown up the piece with his own breath)
and, finally, even has delusions of Giuseppe’s existence in the bathtub and of
him joining her for the Easter festivities in the nearby village.
Anna is far more than odd, of course, as, at moments, the film, loosely
based on a play by Luigi Pirandello, veers towards the kind of haunted tale
wherein the young heroine is being toyed with by a lunatic. Indeed, when Anna
attempts to tell Jeanne another half-truth, that her son is not coming back and
has gone away permanently, she suggests that the girl herself is responsible,
that he has left because of “what happened last summer.” Clearly, Anna has been
listening in to her son’s telephonic messages.
We never do find out what really happened to the couple “last summer,”
nor do we ever discover the cause of Giuseppe’s death. But we can conjecture
that Jeanne may have been
Through the handyman’s help—he purposely
places Anna’s pocket phone within reach of the girl—Jeanne finally does uncover
the mother’s own pleas to her son to pick up the phone and respond, presumably
after he was already dead.
Jeanne, predictably, is quite destroyed
by the discovery; but as she turns to leave this “odd” woman, she nonetheless
forgives her for her behavior with a deep embracement of love. The visit has
turned her from an innocent waif into a mature woman, who obviously will behave
less casually in the future. Certainly, she will never again make a surprise
trip to a future lover’s home.
Los Angeles, May 2, 2016
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2, 2016).
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