‘The Time It Takes’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Francesca Comencini. Italy/France. 2024. 110mins

There’s a delightful circularity about The Time it Takes. Francesca Comencini’s first movie, Pianoforte, which screened on the 1984 Venice Movie Pageant, was an autobiographical drama that drew on her battle with drug habit in her late teen years. Now, after an extended profession as a director that has taken in fictional options, documentaries and TV collection, Comencini is as soon as extra on the Lido with an autobiographical drama  – this time, based mostly on her relationship together with her father, widespread post-war movie director Luigi Comencini. Not solely does The Time It Takes present a 23-year-old Francesca accepting the award for Pianoforte in Venice, it additionally touches on her father’s distaste for autobiographical films.

Unlikely to enchantment to audiences who don’t have any familiarity with the director or her father

However that is no tricksy meta-cinematic train. At its coronary heart, The Time it Takes is a sentimental drama a few father-daughter rapport, one that’s saved from schmaltz largely by its palpable ardour for cinema and grounded performances from Fabrizio Gifuni as Luigi and Romana Maggiora Vergano as Francesca. (Vergano’s breakout position got here within the Italian field workplace sensation of 2023, Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow). Nonetheless, The Time It Takes appears unlikely to enchantment to audiences who don’t have any familiarity with both Francesca or Luigi, regardless of the script’s valiant makes an attempt to attract common messages from what was clearly an intense and complex relationship.

Set between Rome and Paris, The Time It Takes can be launched in Italy on 21 September by 01 Distribution, and in France by Pyramide in February 2025. Exterior of these two core territories, its finest prospects seems to be festivals platforms the place it may be contextualised – maybe even as a part of a double invoice with a Luigi Comencini traditional. 

Luigi, who died in 2007, just about invented the commedia all’italiana style along with his 1953 traditional Bread, Love And Desires, and by the top of his profession had round 40 films to his title. However, refreshingly, The Time it Takes holds off from dutifully incorporating all of the titles he was directing when Francesca was a child. As an alternative, the primary a part of the movie – during which a primary-school-aged Francesca is performed by Anna Mangiocavallo, a first-time actress with a present for naturalism – hinges totally on Luigi’s vastly widespread 1972 TV miniseries The Adventures of Pinocchio. Carlo Collodi’s traditional kids’s e-book turns into a leitmotiv that spills over into the remainder of a movie that’s partly in regards to the re-animation of a younger lady with rock-bottom shallowness by a stern however form father determine.

Round a 3rd of the way in which in, we leap ahead in time to the late Seventies to find Luigi and Francesca nonetheless residing in the identical bourgeois Roman condominium, however hardly speaking. She’s now a sullen, clearly sad younger lady close to the top of highschool, whereas he appears misplaced and embittered, unsettled by TV information stories about Crimson Brigade terrorist assaults and by the primary indicators of the Parkinson’s that might afflict him for the final 15 years of his life. It’s curious that we by no means see any signal of Francesca’s three older sisters or any hint of a mom determine (Luigi’s spouse, Sicilian aristocrat Giulia Grifeo di Partanna, was the mom of all 4 ladies, and outlived her husband by greater than 10 years).

One in every of Francesca’s sisters, Cristina Comencini, is a fellow director, whereas one other, veteran manufacturing designer Paola, has labored on movies directed by her father and each her sisters – together with this one. With its flooring polished to a excessive sheen, the lengthy, many-doored hall of the condominium she helped her sister plan out right here is used inventively to underline the rising distance between Luigi and the adolescent daughter he now not understands – however it’s additionally the location of a cathartic rapprochement.

Warmly and empathetically shot by main Italian DoP Luca Bigazzi, The Time it Takes additionally incorporates, particularly in its elegiac third-act Parisian part, out-takes from a number of the silent films Luigi helped to save lots of when he was a younger movie buff in Thirties Milan, which grew to become a part of the gathering of the Cineteca di Milano. These silent divas and can-can dancers by no means completely meld with the father-daughter story – which ends with a barely clunky magical realist sequence – however they’re nonetheless a delight to observe.