Don't Move
could tell you that the performances of this film are consummate, outstanding, subtle. I could tell you that the cinematography is stunning, innovative, affective, and decisively employed. I could tell you that the direction is sure-handed, natural, brilliant, etc., and I could think up all sorts of adjectives to describe the editing, the soundtrack, and all the films composite parts in turn. And it would all be pretty much true.
But that would be stupid. Go see the movie. It will testify to its quality far more eloquently than I ever could.
When a film works, it works in its entirety, and not in its parts. Don't Move is such a film. The experience it projects overwhelms and renders irrelevant any isolated appreciation of technique. We come to see a story, and when the story is well told, we watch the story and not the moving mouth of the storyteller.
Don't Move centers on the life of Timoteo, a wealthy surgeon with a beautiful house and a beautiful wife. He's a respectable middle class man, bored and slightly alienated, he's selfish, cruel and at times violent. Summing him up like this, I wouldn't blame you for not being terribly interested in him, except perhaps to despise him.
But Timoteo’s story is framed by the walls of a hospital waiting room: as his daughter undergoes an operation after a motorcycle accident, the events of his life unfold as he remembers them. The sympathy this device earns for Timoteo is enough to offset any sense of moral indignation we might naturally feel as we witness his crimes. The audience is invited to enter an experience we are normally inoculated against. Despite the brutish and “inhuman” behavior of Timoteo, we are refused the safe distance of moral piety – he remains at all points, human.
But sympathy is not the essential effect produced, it is merely the means. There was, for me at least, a cancelling of affects so that I watched this film from a new distance. I watched a man undergo his fate, and attached myself to that fate for no other reason than that I recognized something of my own. Its funny that I should call it a new distance, because it reminds me most of Greek tragedy in which a man murders his father and marries his mother and still inspires none of the moral revulsion you would experience if you watched his story unfold on the evening news.
What Timoteo remembers in the waiting room doesn’t immediately have much to do with the drama unfolding on the other side of those walls. He thinks about a love affair with a cleaning woman named Italia (Penelope Cruz) he’d had before his daughter was born. Italia is a dirt-poor, unattractive, bow-legged, scrawny woman. Their affair is violent, brutish, and low. The setting, the circumstances, and the characters all contribute to impose a sense of the density of flesh, of sweat, and the dirt that clings to both. Low. This is an easy contrast to the height from which Timoteo is escaping, the floating ethereal world of easy grace his wife inhabits, lounging around their beachside house: the curtains infused with light, floating in the breeze. He is choosing earth over heaven.
To director Sergio Castellitto’s credit, he renders this earth ugly, common, and without grace. He fills it with poverty, dirt, violence, and lust, and once he’s offended every middle-class notion of love and romance, he reveals within the heart of this world a passion and tenderness that renders frigid and pale by comparison the pristine abstractions of wealth that float like incense and track lighting throughout his middle class heaven.
In the end the relationship between the love affair and the daughter is oblique or even arbitrary, and though the notion of loss runs a parallel between these two worlds, I found this theme weak in comparison to that of the love affair. It leaves the frame as a frame, and detracted somewhat from the ending. But to split such hairs distracts from the true achievement of this film which, through the use of that frame, gives us a rare, tragic vision of a love which is not right and certainly not respectable, but for that very reason is all the moreso, love.