Very popular in his native Italy and Europe but only intermittently seen in the States, actor Sergio Castellitto (“Mostly Martha” “Va Savoir”) has the Everyman quality that filmmakers crave – he can play it funny, or straight, without having pretty-boy looks.
This may be why he’s gotten away with “Don’t Move,” a provocative movie that struck a nerve when it was released in Italy. Castellitto not only stars in the film, along with Penelope Cruz, he also directs it.
The flashback story is framed by an accident: Castellitto plays Timoteo, a surgeon whose teenage daughter has been critically injured in a motorcycle crash. This makes him recall a torrid affair he had years before.
Stranded by car trouble in the rundown outskirts of urban sprawl, he meets a supposedly homely young woman, Italia (that’s Cruz). Drinking too much, he forcibly has sex with her.
Later, he returns, and they begin a consensual affair. The film bizarrely forgets about the initial rape, and settles into following the passion between his restless bourgeois and her lonely waif. Penelope Cruz has been made up to be ugly (a particularly disconcerting gap in her teeth has been added), but she still looks pretty good.
Meanwhile, Timoteo is married to a beautiful woman (Claudia Gerini), but the heat has gone out of their marriage. So back and forth the story goes – will he walk away from his comfortable life for the sake of mad passion?
Although the film is technically well-done, and the actors always give you something to watch, I stopped caring about this question. The movie begins repeating itself, and the whole thing has a grandly poetic feel that becomes overblown. The fact that the girl is named “Italia” seems to suggest a big fat metaphor that the film hasn’t digested.
Interesting that the novel the movie is based on was written by a woman, Margaret Mazzantini. I wonder whether the male-female perspective changed the material at all, but I don’t wonder hard enough to find out.
Penelope Cruz and Sergio Castellitto star in “Don’t Move.”
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