HOPE FOR US YET
THERE ARE CERTAIN MOMENTS IN THE CAREER OF A filmmaker that illuminate not only their past movies but also the ones to come: the opening of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, which, after his so-called Fascist Trilogy, signaled the director’s ideological and aesthetic awakening; the furious chasing shots in the prelude of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta, a sudden clarification of the severity and rigor of the Belgian brothers’ filmic vision after La Promesse; or the monumental wordless prologue of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, which inaugurated the director’s critical exploration of American history.
Contrary to these filmic rebirths—moments of stylistic and thematic expansion rather than turning points—the crucial revelatory moment in Alice Rohrwacher’s oeuvre doesn’t emerge at the beginning of a film, but at the end. The final two scenes in (2014), each conceived as a departure from naturalism into earthly fantasy, take the shape of transitional shots. In the film’s second-to-last scene, after the young Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), the eldest daughter of a family of beekeepers, tracks down their missing foster child, Martin (Luis Huilca), the camera pans from the boy, who sleeps stretched out on the floor of a cave lit by a campfire, up to the walls where the shadows of some kids, probably Gelsomina and Martin, play around before the camera pans back down to the slumbering boy. Within a single camera movement, the coming-of-age narrative—Rohrwacher’s favorite—turns into a lyrical conundrum: after this bewitching celebration of childlike playfulness, with shadows evoking Plato’s Cave, Martin vanishes from the movie
