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 In cinemas Thursday [M]
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Runtime: 93mins
Michael Winterbottom is one of those directors with a reputation for avoiding categories or genres. With each new film he redefines himself, moving from westerns (The Claim) and period pieces (adaptations of Thomas Hardy’s Jude and Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy) to extended music biopics (24 Hour Party People) and muted science fiction (Code 46). There have even been stories of human trafficking (In This World) and documentaries about the perversions of the Coalition of the Willing (Road To Guantanamo). And I still have arguments with mates about his soft porn music romance 9 Songs.
So it’s really no surprise that Winterbottom’s latest film is pretty much unclassifiable. Is Genova – which recently toured around Australia with the Lavazza Italian Film Festival – a love story, a family drama, a tragedy, a challenging childrens’ film, or a story of loss and redemption set in an ancient city? Well, to tell the truth, it’s hard to say.
In the opening scenes, it quickly becomes obvious that something dramatic is going to happen, as Marianne (Hope Davis) drives along a busy highway playing games in the car with her two daughters. Moments later, the girls are suddenly without a mother, and Joe (Colin Firth) is a directionless widower feeling like half a person and unsure how to deal with his two traumatised daughters. An answer comes in the form of a job offer in Italy, and the family takes a year out to head to Genova to lick their wounds.
In the rabbit warrens of the old city, Joe’s college buddy Barbara (Catharine Keener) finds them a cheap apartment, and has a crack at renewing a long dead relationship. An adolescent Kelly (played by the disturbingly thin Willa Holland) sets off to explore her burgeoning sexuality in a thinly-disguised rebellion against her father, while her sister Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) juggles soul-destroying nightmares of the accident that killed her mother, with wide-eyed appreciation of her new home, and Joe begins to rebuild his new life as a single parent.
This is all pretty standard family drama, and – dare I say it – feels a lot like a midday movie. Yes, the depiction of grief is quite articulate and painful, but there are some very clumsy moments that almost drag the film into farce, especially poor Mary’s hallucinations, which start sensitively, but are ultimately ridiculous. From a less experienced director, this might be forgivable, but Winterbottom’s heavy-handed direction here is regrettable.
**½
TIM MILFULL
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