IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
NOT OF THIS WORLD (Fuori dal Mondo)
A film by Giuseppe Piccione
With Margherita Buy, Silvio Orlando
The Screen NR 100 min.
Giuseppe Piccione's Not of This World has won bucketfuls of awards from the Italian academy and a number of international film festivals, and has the luck of the draw to be a nominee for Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film in the year that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is dominating the mix. Still, as they say, it's honor enough to be nominated in such exalted company.
Piccione has created what amounts to a high-end soap opera, but the emphasis is on high end. A nun, Sister Caterina (Margherita Buy), has a foundling baby thrust into her arms on a walk through the park in Milan. She takes him to the hospital, but she can't let it go at that. She undertakes a bit of detective work to track down the baby's mother.
Ernesto (Silvio Orlando) owns a dry cleaning establishment. He doesn't much like his work, but he does it obsessively, to the exclusion of having a life. On a night about nine months earlier he apparently had sex with a girl who was briefly an employee. The girl turns out to be the mother of the abandoned baby, and Ernesto might be the father. The three lives, and particularly Ernesto's and Caterina's, come together.
What is unusually appealing in this movie is its examination of choice and change. Caterina is eleven months away from her final vows. She is sure of her calling, and is a beacon and a rock of reassurance for the younger novices. But the baby awakens something in her. She becomes vulnerable to the lure of the possibilities offered by life outside the cloister, and to the taunts and questions of people who consider the veil a barricade behind which to hide from the dangers of the real world.
Ernesto is a closed, life-rejecting nebbish. He takes dry cleaning seriously, but he can never remember the names of the young women who work for him. For him, dry cleaning is an end in itself; he can't quite fathom these people who flit through it en route to more fulfilling lives. He turns down invitations from friends, and advances from women. He goes home at night and eats a solitary meal and reads a magazine. The most difficult thing to believe in this story is that he would have had a tumble with the pretty teenager who turns out to be the baby's mother.
The baby - this inconvenient eruption of life - is the catalyst that brings together Caterina and Ernesto and works change in their lives, and it is one of this movie's considerable satisfactions to watch these two superb actors express those changes. The directions they take are not always predictable, but they make sense. Neither are quite "of this world", one cloistered behind the veil, the other behind a loner's defenses, but life reaches in and prods them.
The camerawork by Luca Bigazzi beautifully sets off Piccioni's intelligent screenplay and direction. Ludovico Einaudi's score sometimes overwhelms the action - there is a subplot involving a false-alarm heart attack suffered by Ernesto as a result of stress, during which he complains that he can't breathe, and the music sometimes threatens to bring on a similar condition in the audience.
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