the plot and review of the film

As long as it takes. Directed by Francesca Comencini. Cast: Fabrizio Gifuni, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Anna Mangiocavallo (film, at the cinema).

Francesca Comencini’s new film, presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival (who knows why) has the grace of a waltz and the strength of an electric shock.

Comencini has been a director since he was just over twenty years old, today he is 63 and after having debuted with a very personal film about addiction (Pianoforte1984), over time she has successfully competed in important projects but in a certain sense “neutral” with respect to her life (series such as Gomorrah e Django she directed them). Today, with The time it takes (what a beautiful title) a circle closes because Francesca returns to that personal story of hers, with all the right distance possible.

But above all, the film tells the story of her extraordinary friendship (that’s what I feel like calling it) with her father Luigi, the director who passed away in 2007 and the father of four daughters, had by the same wife: Eleonora, Cristina (also a director), Paola (set designer, also for this film) and Francesca, of course, who is the youngest.

In the film, neither the sisters nor the mother are seen. It is a dry tale of two, a fragment of a love story between the great director and his daughter, first a child and then a young woman, largely set in two basic apartments (in Rome and then in Paris).

The little girl is charming (and how good Francesca is at directing children, one of the talents she inherited from her father), we see her moving on the set of the legendary Pinocchio Luigi’s television series and reconstructed by his daughter with love and poetry: the “light on horseback” scene is the most beautiful moment of Italian cinema seen this year, thank you.

With adolescence, the relationship between Francesca and her father becomes painfully complicated. She becomes an elusive rebel, a serial dreamer, a pseudo revolutionary, attracted by that ramshackle world of the second half of the Seventies, years of blood on the streets and heroin in the veins of too many kids.

To save her from the abyss, dribbling the castle of lies typical of drug addicts, just like Geppetto chasing his Pinocchio, comes her father and, with him, the cinema.

Cinema as a lifeline, but at the same time as a job that must not become all-encompassing.

“Life always comes first, then cinema,” says Luigi, a man who knows balance and knows how to teach it, he who has lived off cinema and who dedicated himself to cinema in danger when he was young: in the film there are also some surprising and moving inserts from the films that Comencini senior recovered after the war and donated to the Cineteca di Milano.

I won’t add anything else: when a film is this successful, one can only recommend going to see it.

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