28/04/2022 - Despite some flaws, Beatrice Baldacci’s offering is a personal film by a director to watch, with the power to stir up empathy whilst sadly and reluctantly preserving its mysteries

Developed within the 2020/21 Biennale College Cinema programme and presented in a premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival where it scooped the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Award, Beatrice Baldacci’s movie The Den [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is hitting Italian cinemas today courtesy of PFA Films. The Den has very specific origins: in 2019, the debut director won a trophy in Venice’s Orizzonti section for her short documentary film Superheroes With Superpowers, in which Baldacci used old family footage to look back at her childhood and her relationship with her mother who was suffering from a neurodegenerative disorder. It’s reminiscent of Alina Marazzi’s wonderful 2002 documentary For One More Hour With You, which reconstructed the life of her mother Luisa, who suffered with depression and took her own life at just 33 years of age, bringing together home movies shot on 16 and 8 mm film over a thirty-year period by her maternal grandfather, Milanese editor Ulrico Hoepli.

Beatrice Baldacci has gone even further in this particular depiction of grief, developing a fictitious screenplay in league with Edoardo Puma and shooting a feature-length film, starring Irene Vetere and Lorenzo Aloi. It’s the present-day, it’s summertime, and we’re in a rural area of central Italy where 18-year-old Giulio lives with his parents (Paolo Ricci and Elisa D’Eusanio) who seems to hail from the city but have chosen to live off the land by way of their small farm. Giulio is carefree and lives an authentic life surrounded by nature, so he’s perturbed when twenty-year-old Lia moves into a long- abandoned villa in the neighbourhood - erotically perturbed, to be specific. Lia seems shy and stand-offish, but she’s clearly attracted to Giulio too. Their sexual game is dominated by the former, who puts the young man to the test by demanding small gestures.

The mystery surrounding Lia’s presence is soon revealed: the young woman has brought her mother (Hélène Nardini), who is losing her mental functions, to her childhood home. It’s a den, as the title suggests; a place to hide, where Lia can express her pain for her mother’s cognitive decline; a refuge and a reminder of a happy time in which Lia can ensconce her mother forever, a woman who’s already a babbling ghost with a helpless body which Lia is forced to look after. But it’s also a space to help negotiate the reality outside; a free zone characterised by an illicit drive – death - which challenges the taboo surrounded assisted dying. In this sense, the director reproduces the usual film metaphors, and her allusion to Hitchcock’s Psycho is anything but a surprise.

But it’s in the scenes showcasing nature up close – blades of grass, insects, flowers, shrubs – which are shot using natural light and in low definition by director of photography Giorgio Giannoccaro, that Beatrice Baldacci – a disciple of Daniele Ciprì – openly pays tribute to cinema. They constitute the daughter’s final gift to her mother and ready the revelation of this idealised thus unfulfilling garden surrounding the villa. Despite the defects which often characterise first films – especially when it comes to directing actors – The Den is a personal film by a director to watch, which has the power to stir up empathy whilst sadly and reluctantly preserving its mysteries.

The Den is produced by Andrea Gori and Aurora Alma Bartiromo on behalf of Lumen Films, in collaboration with RAI Cinema and NABA-Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti.

(Translated from Italian)