On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: CORPO CELESTE (Film Movement).

CORPO CELESTE (Celestial Body)
Coming home a family finds themselves outsiders...
By Cynthia Kane

I am stubborn. I refuse to give up on Italian cinema and CORPO CELESTE (celestial body) brings me new hope that it’s not only alive, but that there’s pockets of real brilliance in the country that gave us – in the past - so many cinematic geniuses.

Here not only do we have an emerging young talent, Alice Rohrwacher, but a haunting tale of youth told in a style that hearkens back to Italian neo-realism and yet feels completely contemporary and fresh. Yet, her work feels inspired by the Dardenne Brothers – understated, documentary-like, a window into an intimate world that’s both private and humanly fragile.

When thirteen year-old Marta (Yle Vianello), her older sister (Paola Lavini) and mother (Anita Caprioli) move back to the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria from Switzerland, where they’ve spent the last ten+ years, they are strangers in their homeland. Why this family spent so much time abroad is never clear; there’s obviously no father or husband in the mix. Coming back…coming home the family is nothing if not outsiders.

Yet first-time feature director Alice Rohrwacher's CORPO CELESTE isn’t just the story of an inquisitive young girl’s coming of age. It’s also a look at what’s happened in the last years to Italy, her working-class people, the Church, how it’s failed her and a country of people devoted to Roman Catholicism.

From the opening scene, shot by hand-held camera, French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (who also shot WIm Wenders’ PINA) doesn’t capture a romantically, beautiful Italy that we all know through tourism and the movies, but a ancient town battered and rebuilt with cheap modern edifices, scarred roads and highways, waterways that look more like sewers, a city trapped by economic crisis. The church and its community center where Marta must go to the classes that will lead her to confirmation looks more like a cheap casino or a glossy cinema multiplex – a place desperate to pull in the masses instead a of temple of solace, prayer and reflection.