A documentary that is more filmed essay and impressionistic poem than fly-on-the-wall reality, The Mouth of the Wolf is a meditation on the passage of time and how decay and change cause one era to be supplanted by another. Set in Genoa, the film mixes random archival images of life there from bygone ages much of it connected to Genoa’s role as a port city—with more contemporary images. Taken together, it all amounts to a ghostly scrapbook that is a testament to the haunting accumulation of memories over many years.
At the heart of The Mouth of the Wolf is the strange story of middle-aged partners Enzo and Mary, who met and fell in love in prison. Enzo, a hard-time criminal who spent a total of 27 years behind bars, met Mary, a transexual drug addict, over poetry and a screening of Bambi. Mary waited years for Enzo to complete his sentence, and now they scrape by in the city, impoverished, dreaming of life in the country, facing a drift into old age.
What this has to do with the film’s larger theme represents leaps of lyricism by filmmaker Pietro Marcello, who engages our intuition in exploring the mysteries of time and remembrance. In the end, as we look at glorious snippets of life on a sunny Genoa beach long, long ago, one feels paradoxically connected to everything and yet adrift on currents of change taking us far from our shore. Strongly recommended. Aud: J, H, C, P.