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THE
GIFT
2?/10
Il
Dono : Italy 2003 : Michelangelo FRAMMARTINO : 80
mins
Writer-director
Frammartino has described his feature debut as "a report of a disaster
in slow motion." He's right... unfortunately. I lasted about an hour
before heading for the exit. No final-reel payoff could have possibly
been worth the aching tedium of what had gone before. The only reason
I hadn't walked out earlier was that I didn't want to disturb the 'enjoyment'
of the four fellow patrons sitting between myself and the aisle. But what
I took for rapt attention was in fact bored paralysis - until they shook
themselves awake and vacated the premises, allowing myself a direct escape-route.
This picture manages the tricky feat of being even worse than Sam Raimi's
tiresome southern-gothic psychic-drama of the same
title: it would have been a welcome relief if that picture's villainous
Keanu Reeves had come stomping into view.
The first
warning-sign comes with The Gift's opening titles. "Il Dono"
they read, sans subtitles. We then see various static episodes
of life in and around a small, scenic clifftop village. Most of them feature
a very old man played by an 'actor' named Michelangelo Frammartino. This
isn't the director - it's his nonagenarian father, though, typically,
there's no way of knowing this from the film itself. The old man's dog
dies and is buried by a pair of young handymen. One of them leaves his
mobile phone behind. This perplexes the oldster when it rings, vibrating
across his wooden dining table. The lads also leave behind a pornographic
photograph. This intrigues the oldster. Meanwhile a parallel "plot"
takes shape involving a promiscuous young woman who seems to be mentally
subnormal. It's suggested that these two strands will probably come together
at the end, though of course any 'meaning' will be left vague.
 The
film's status as inscrutable enigma is bolstered by a total lack of subtitles.
But it isn't true to say there's no dialogue. We do hear voices - singing,
laughing. But the people responsible are kept carefully off-screen. Frammartino
instead foregrounds individuals who communicate via meaningful looks when
they aren't sitting, stony-faced and silent, seemingly defeated by life.
It the similar kind of offensive nonsense also found in Cuban award-winner
Havana Suite,
in which garrulous folk are rendered artifically mute for the purposes
of Art: despite his title Frammartino doesn't give - he robs them
of their voice.
This technique
isn't always a recipe for trouble - Hungarian variant Hukkle
also contrived to get by without dialogue, but did so by placing the human
participants in a dazzlingly strange world of animal activity. Frammartino
doesn't "give" his audience very much at all, apart from one
sub-Ioseliani sight-gag involving a child's ball bouncing down the village's
steep streets to fall down off the cliffs. Elsewhere, he seems to think
that any mundane activity, if performed sufficiently slowly and filmed
in a sufficiently long take, is somehow magically transformed into something
artistically valid and worthy of our attention. His ideas are thoroughly
second-hand, from the old codger savouring his solitary meal to the beautiful
young woman who's too simple-headed to resist any sexual advance - a classic
misogynistic stereotype. Frammartino is a fine example of the pseudo-artists
who profit from the lax systems by which supposedly highbrow works are
funded and then programmed at film festivals. As a gallery installation,
The Gift might just possibly pass muster. But presenting
it in a cinema to the paying public is nothing less than an insult.
15 September,
2004
(seen 21st August FilmHouse Edinburgh : public show [walkout]: - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for our full coverage of the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival
For other
films rated 1/10 and 2/10 check out our Diorama
of Dishonour
by Neil
Young
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