waiting on the dead
by
Douglas Messerli
Giacomo
Bendotti, Ilaria Macchia, Andrea Paolo Massara, and Piero Messina (based on the
play La vita che ti diedi by Luigi
Pirandello), Piero Messina (director) L’attesa
(The Wait) / 2015, USA 2016
In
the very midst of a funeral for her son, Giuseppe,
grieving Anna (Juliette Binoche) receives a telephone message: her son’s
girlfriend, Jeanne (Lou de Laâge) has just arrived in Sicily to be with her
lover. Instead of sending the poor girl packing, Anna dispatches her servant
out to pick her up, while friends and relatives gather in the darkened villa to
mourn.
Arriving in the midst of the gathering,
Jeanne seems to have no comprehension as to one might be going on. Straining
credulity, director Piero Messina simply provides her a room and the handyman’s
explanation that Anna is not feeling well.
The following morning Anna explains that
it was her brother who has died, the first of many lies she tells the innocent
girl. But the worst of her lies, which both her sister-in-law and handyman
cannot forgive her, is that Giuseppe is simply not there yet, and will probably
return in time for Easter celebrations.
So begins Messina’s beautiful and
somewhat haunting film, where, for reasons of her own, Anna keeps the young
Jeanne on in her villa, cooking for her and even for two local boys whom Jeanne
casually encounters in the nearby lake.
In part, of course, the truly devastated
mother simply must have someone young around her, and by entrapping his son’s
girlfriend she clearly, psychologically speaking, believes that she still
controls a part of Giuseppe life. If her refusal to face the truth is, at
first, rather unbelievable, we gradually come to perceive the kind of Oedipal
relationship she had with her son, as Binoche stunningly peers off into space,
sucks the air out of a small inflated sunbed (presumably her son had blown up
the piece with his own breath) and, finally, even has delusions of Giuseppe’s
existence in the bathtub and of him joining her for the Easter festivities in
the nearby village.
Some of this, admittedly, seems to be
merely confusing for the uninitiated viewer, but, of course, that same
confusion washes over Jeanne, who repeatedly describes in her telephone calls,
attempting to reach her missing boyfriend, that his mother is “odd.”
Anna is far more than odd, of course, as,
at moments, the film, loosely based on a play by Luigi Pirandello, veers
towards the kind of haunted tale wherein the young heroine is being toyed with by
a lunatic. Indeed, when Anna attempts to tell Jeanne another half-truth, that
her son is not coming back and has gone away permanently, she suggests that the
girl herself is responsible, that he has left because of “what happened last
summer.” Clearly, Anna has been listening in to her son’s telephonic messages.
We never do find out what really happened
to the couple “last summer,” nor do we ever discover the cause of Giuseppe’s
death. But we can conjecture that Jeanne may have been temporarily unfaithful
and that Giuseppe, perhaps entrapped in the extremely close relationship with
his mother, committed suicide. Obviously such conjectures are beside the point.
Messina brilliantly keeps us guessing. But such imaginative explanations might
at least explain some of the extreme grief we see in Anna’s lovely face. But at
the same time, in slowing down the film to near stasis, we cannot help, like
the girl, but become restless and impatience with all the mystery. Even the
girl’s daily swims have the languorous look of a drowning instead of a
refreshing dive into the lovely waters.
Through the handyman’s help—he purposely
places Anna’s pocket phone within reach of the girl—Jeanne finally does uncover
the mother’s own pleas to her son to pick up the phone and respond, presumably
after he was already dead.
Jeanne, predictably, is quite destroyed
by the discovery; but as she turns to leave this “odd” woman, she nonetheless
forgives her for her behavior. The visit has turned her from an innocent waif
into a mature woman, who obviously will behave less casually in the future.
Certainly, she will never again make a surprise trip to a future lover’s home.
Los Angeles, May
2, 2016
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