HET PAROOL
Article ‘Una Ballata Bianca’ in Het Parool, Amsterdam 5 September 2007 in the occasion of the release of the film in the Netherlands
Balance of a marriage
(Vote 4 out of 5 stars)
The in Holland working Italian Stefano Odoardi, paints in his debut film an old couple from which the wife still has a short time left to live. Man and women are drawing up the balance of their marriage in silence. The result is a penetrating image of human incompetence.
We see two old people who are from the generation which doesn’t talk about feelings. On slippers they reticently stumble along their living room.
The romantic image of an old couple that doesn’t need to talk because they understand each other wordlessly, suddenly falls to pieces when their thoughts are being heard trough voice-overs. The two are looking back on a lonely marriage in which longings where never pronounced.
We taste the womans disillusion(‘Why you behaved like I didn’t exist?’) and the mans’ hesitation(‘I don’t know if I have failed’).
The two never talk with each other. Tenderness –a touch, a loving word- are absent. The woman remembers sex ‘from long, very long ago’. The couple lives by each other, but not with each other.
Una Ballata Bianca is inspired on the theatre piece of the same name from actor, writer and director Kees Roorda, who opened the Theatre Festival last week.
The Italian Stefano Odoardi, who collaborated with Roorda before, keeps away from becoming theatrical in his filming, by showing a woman who wanders along the Italian countryside, apart from the old couple in the house. We see her on village squares, close to ruins and in empty fields. Who is this woman? The old woman in earlier times? Or does she represent the death?
Una Ballata Bianca, which is shown with English subtitles, is not unique because of it’s subject –there is no lack of films about marriage relations- but because of the style. The fixed framed images strongly remind about the work of Tarkovski. Especially his (Italian) film Nostalgia seems to have been a source of inspiration.
More filmmakers were inspired by the Russian master, but mostly it resulted into weak imitation cinema. This is not the case with Una Ballata Bianca, which was made with barely fourty thousend euro.
Odoardi managed to give his images a tension. In this he owes a lot to the old couple Nicola and Carmela Lanci, who never acted before, but who are impressive as reticent aged people.
Bitter is the end, when the man after the death of his wife, does what he couldn’t do while she was alive: to declare his love to her.
JOS VAN DER BURG
