re:mote voices

Title:Don’t Move
Cast: Penelope Cruz, Sergio Castellitto, Claudia Gerini, Elena Perino
Director: Sergio Castellitto

Angela (Elena Perino) is a spunky 15-year-old Italian teenager, driving around on her moped. However, when she comes off her bike, her helmet hasn’t been strapped on properly. The film Don’t Move opens with her being rushed to hospital with a severe head injury. As she is prepared for emergency surgery a staff member goes through her things trying to find out who she is, when she finds Angela’s details though, she recognises the name. Angela’s father works in this hospital.

Timoteo Rossi (Sergio Castellitto) is in surgery when a colleague comes in with some urgent news. His daughter has been in an accident and requires emergency surgery. Distraught, he rushes to the theatre, and quickly concludes that there is not much chance that she will survive. While his colleagues set about doing what they can to save her life, he paces back and forth, stressed and upset, looking back at his life. Surprisingly from here, the role of Timeo’s daughter is a minor one.

Don’t Move is the story of Timeo and Italia. One day Timeo’s car broke down in a small town. While trying to get help he is persuaded have a couple of drinks. Meets Italia (Penelope Cruz) and uses her phone. Having done this he finally has someone looking at his car. From which he takes the strange step of going back to Italia’s and raping her. Later he goes back to apologise for his actions, and essentially rapes her again, but leaves money this time. From there a relationship starts, one that I personally found quite incomprehensible, given that it essentially evolves from a series of rapes.

Strangely Timeo and Italia fall in love. Italia gets pregnant. Timeo decides that he is going to leave his wife Elsa (Claudia Gerini). But the night that he has decided to tell Elsa everything is the night that she reveals that she is also pregnant. Which of course throws the already unbalanced Timeo off balance.

Don’t Move is a little baffling. At the centre of this is how the character of Timeo behaves. On the one hand we have this greying doctor, stressed about his 15-year old daughter. On the other hand, we follow his unhappiness with his marriage, how that leads him to rape a woman, and then form a relationship with that woman. Along the way, we see him confess his crimes in huge letters on the beach and then to a cleaning woman. We watch his odd behaviour at a medical conference, as he reads through a presentation, or later how he starts shouting and storms off a plane, as it is about to take off. All of which seems to form a picture of an impulsive man, reckless and not especially predictable.

Don’t Move is showing at the same time as the French film 5x2, taken together they don’t paint a pretty picture of the male sex. Timeo seems to be as thoroughly unpleasant as 5x2’s Gilles. In Don’t Move the big question seems to be, why does Penelope Cruz’s character having anything to do with this man? Italia is depicted as a rough woman, one who looks as though she has just recently been beaten with her permanently darkened eyes. Her hair is straggly, shot through with dirty blonde streaks. She is usually dressed in a dishevelled manner, and lives in a crumbling house that she is going to be evicted from shortly. So, essentially, Italia is a hard luck case, but does that explain her interest in Timeo? As the film unfolds, one does get impressions of her loneliness, and how it seems that she has been starved of affection. So perhaps a man paying her repeated attention and declaring his love for her is enough, even after the rapes?

Sergio Castellitto writes, directs, and takes the lead role of Timeo in his film Don’t Move. For me I don’t entirely know what to make of this film. To a degree it feels like the balance isn’t entirely there. The concentration is too heavily on the story between Timeo and Italia. Even in the straightforward terms of an extra-marital affair, Elsa doesn’t seem to have quite enough of a weight. Though given the intensity of the affair that could be understood, in some versions of this story I have no doubt that the wife wouldn’t have featured as a presence at all. However in the context of Don’t Move, it feels like the story of Angela and Elsa is neglected, that there is more there that could have been told and is not. Particularly given that it is Angela’s accident that triggers these recollections.

Despite these kind of issues, Don’t Move has some interesting things going on in there. There are some interesting thoughts on life and death, the suggestions of spirituality that crop up being a curious touch. Though the most obvious attraction of Don’t Move is the performance by Penelope Cruz, and the way in which Castellitto offers us this astounding character that is so outrageous it just has to be seen to be believed.