Time to recover in cinemas: with the reopening of the cinemas, there are several films distributed that have long been waiting for the moment to be screened.
Among these there is certainly «Babyteeth», the film debut of the Australian director Shannon Murphy that was presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2019.
Based on a play by Rita Kalnejais, the protagonist is a seriously ill teenager who falls in love with a young drug dealer. Her parents don’t approve of her new boyfriend, but the girl’s newfound joie de vivre will make everyone around her understand how important this bond can be.
You can feel all the freshness of the debut film in this teen-movie, apparently like many others, which soon turns into an adolescent drama with delicate tones, capable of playing well with the formal apparatus and with the director’s creativity.
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There are some ingenuities and several passages are rather verbose, but they strike the way in which a not simple theme is treated and the ability to show how, in the face of a love that faces death, traditional morality no longer has any weight.
A brilliant style
Shannon Murphy opts for a brilliant style and manages to avoid the pitfalls of rhetoric that a subject like this brings with it: it plays against the rules and this undoubtedly unconventional product can also appear irreverent, which focuses among other things on humorous passages and it undermines the viewer’s expectations in front of a subject like this. A small surprise, also enhanced by the performance of the cast, among which the excellent performance of the protagonist’s parent couple stands out.
Maternal
From the Locarno Festival 2019 comes «Maternal» by Maura Delpero, an Italian-Argentine co-production, set in Buenos Aires in a shelter for single mothers in difficulty, run by a group of nuns. Sister Paola, who has just arrived from Italy, shows that she has an increasingly intimate affection for one of the girls, the daughter of a young woman who does not seem ready for motherhood.Born in Bolzano but trained in dramaturgy and screenplay in Buenos Aires, Maura Delpero is on his debut in fictional cinema, after having signed several documentaries. To the essential style of her previous projects, the director adds here a particular photographic care, especially in the play of light.Some passages are too forced and studied at the table, but the ideas of the script still give rise to significant considerations, both on the theme of motherhood. as on that of femininity in general. A little more courage in the second part would have made everything even more incisive, but the encounter / clash within the institute, between young mothers not yet ready to be so and nuns who they will never be able to have children, arouses important reflections to think about even at the end of the vision.