La Sapienza

Stunning visuals are combined with an extraordinarily artificial style in filmmaker Eugène Green's haunting tale of Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione), a celebrated French architect famed for his modernist buildings but despondent over the turn his career has taken. Alexandre decides to visit Italy to seek inspiration from the work of his idol, unconventional baroque genius Francesco Borromini. Alexandre is accompanied by his wife, Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman), but along the way decides to stay with a local girl, Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), while enlisting Lavinia's brother, Goffredo (Ludovico Succio), an aspiring architecture student, to be his travelling companion. Some time is devoted to the women, but the focus is mostly on the men as they survey various sites and structures. There is much talk of light and space, love and longing—all delivered by the characters in stilted, affectless cadences while standing almost still and often staring directly into the camera. One sequence is a dreamy re-creation of a scene from Borromini's life staged without faces shown, and Green himself appears toward the close as an Iraqi refugee who speaks a near-extinct language and discourses on sadness, loss, and their cure. The deadpan approach of La Sapienza occasionally takes on a playful tone, but for the most part this is a gorgeous but talky, deliberately paced exercise in artifice that probes the need for human contact and ancient beauty in an increasingly vulgar age. Recommended. (F. Swietek)