When you make the (brave? foolhardy?) decision to stay at a festival like Toronto past the half-way point, past the point where both major stars and hit-seeking journalists have gone home and the remaining premieres are usually less hit than miss, you do it because you hope that you’re going to be the one to catch a hidden masterpiece. Michael Winterbottom’s Genova may not qualify for use of the M-word, but for a film that made it through two of its three public screenings with zero buzz, it casts a lasting spell that comes as a pleasant surprise. (Ironically, perhaps, I walked out of the Genova screening and directly into David Poland, who wrote this post late last night lamenting TIFF’s problematic front-loading. All I’ll say is that though there are 6 or 8 or 10 films that I’m kicking myself for having missed, none of them were scheduled to screen for the press after Tuesday.)
Marianne (Hope Davis) steers the family car down an icy road. Her daughters Kelly and Mary (Willa Holland and Perla Haney-Jardine) play a giggly road trip game in the back seat. Mary innocently involves her mother in the game, and Marianne loses control of the car. Though teenage Kelly and pre-tween Mary survive unscathed, their mother doesn’t, and six months after a funeral where all involved seem more dazed than grief-stricken, their academic father Joe (Colin Firth) announces that they’re going to pack up and move from Chicago to Genova, Italy for a year. He’ll teach, the girls will learn a second language, and all will leave their grief behind and start new lives.
That plan works best for Kelly, who responds to the break from normalcy like the “on” switch has been flicked on her latent adolescence. But while she’s flitting back and forth between sullen theatrics and secret rendesvous with a scooter-riding Italian jerk (about which we learn as little as the average single father probably knows about who their teen daughter is dating, and who Kelly is given convenient excuse to discard when the narrative demands that she Grow Up A Little), her sister and father are having a harder time forging ahead. Little Mary comes to believe that Marianne has been visiting her from beyond the grave. She wakes up screaming for her mommy, she wanders off into the woods convinced that the spectre of her mother is leading her by the hand, she drives her stoic Englishman father crazy with her deeply felt spiritualism.
Meanwhile, Joe seems suspiciously unhaunted by his dead wife, and is instead forced to deal with the past in the form of Barbara (Catherine Keener), the college colleague who has invited him to Italy in the hopes of finally consummating her 20 year crush. Apparently not interested in looking backwards, Joe instead gravitates towards Rosa, an attractive, much younger Neopolitan student. Numb with anxiety over how to raise two girls alone, his choice to seek attention from the sexy, undemanding source as opposed to a mother surrogate is not unlike Kelly’s moves to flee the family and reinvent herself as a nubile party girl. Both father and daughter are avoiding the baggage of the past and their responsibilities to an unplanned present.
We’ve seen a number of Mediterranean travelogues of late from filmmakers who–at least according to some segment of the critical audience–”should” be offering us more. Though there’s no shortage of location-dependent beauty in Genova, it provides literal background and mood that’s essential to Winterbottom’s portrait (shot with his signature hand-held cameras, which generally follow the characters closely, even into the sea) of these emotional fugitives. And while if you asked me to name an actor synonymous with on-screen naturalism, I would not before now immediately name Colin Firth, he very convincingly envelops himself in the desperate fog of Sudden Single Father Syndrome.
So while it may not be the great unknown discovery of TIFF ‘08, Genova more than succeeds as a small, precise, personal picture with no larger ambition than to set a tragedy in motion and fully describe the way it feels for each member of a family of three to be mired in the fallout. What it lacks in grand aims it makes up in emotional honesty, and for those of us Winterbottom fans who were starting to get impatient with the filmmaker’s drift into political didacticism, it’s nice to see him return to making films about people.
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