There are Italian beginnings of which little is said and which instead deserve a certain attention, often much more than other films of our house that promise a lot in media terms and which instead are conventional and very banal: it is part of the first category “Small body”, interesting first work by Laura Samani, a director from Trieste born in 1989, who switched to fiction feature film after making her debut with some shorts and documentaries.
Selected in several important festivals (from the Semaine de la Critique of the Cannes Film Festival to the Turin Film Festival), “Piccolo corpo” is a film set at the beginning of the last century that stars Agata, a girl who gives birth to a stillborn baby. . According to Catholic tradition, the child cannot be baptized and her soul is doomed to remain in Limbo. Agata, however, hears about a place in the mountains, where newborns are brought back to life with a single breath, to baptize them and save their soul: thus she embarks on this journey, with her daughter’s little body hidden, which will make her meet a mysterious boy and solitary, ready to help her. A few lines of the subject are enough to notice the narrative peculiarity of this film, small as a production but full of ideas, which transports us to another era to put before our eyes an adventurous odyssey that has as its last destination a possible miracle.
A film about the relationship between humans and the environment
It can be read as a coming-of-age story, as a spiritual film or as a film that thinks about the female body: Laura Samani’s debut is all of this and, despite there being some slightly immature passage, she manages to hit the mark. With a strong imprint of realism (also for the choice of non-professional actors and for the use of dialect), the director also offers a series of beautiful images that relate and contrast human beings and the surrounding environment: they are there are several passages that focus on places as fascinating as they are difficult that the young and determined protagonist has to cross.
Despite some slowdowns in pace, the film holds up well until the end and leaves more than one food for thought at the end of the credits: the result is an intense debut to be discovered.
Murder on the Nile
A very different production is that of “Murder on the Nile”, a new film by Kenneth Branagh, which adapts another novel by Agatha Christie after “Murder on the Orient Express”, released in 2017. director but also plays the investigator Hercule Poirot in another film with a choral cast full of well-known faces: from Annette Bening to Gal Gadot, through Armie Hammer. screen by John Guillermin in 1978 with Peter Ustinov in the role of Poirot, Branagh stages a story capable of transmitting all the claustrophobia typical of Agatha Christie’s narrative style: in this case we are on a boat on the Nile, where the protagonists are a couple in honeymoon, of course the detective Hercule Poirot, other characters and … above all a mysterious murder. Just like the previous “Murder on the Orient Express”, Branagh makes an enjoyable but somewhat p hygro, devoid of particular smudges but equally incapable of giving great sequences worthy of note.The starting material is so rich in facets that the vision is followed willingly anyway, also thanks to a discreet packaging, but the artistic flashes are hidden and, above all , the cast is not up to the task. The comparison with the group of interpreters of the 1978 film (in addition to Ustinov, there were, among others, David Niven, Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury, Jane Birkin, Jon Finch and Bette Davis) is nothing short of merciless.