Daniele Luchetti’s Confidenza let’s slip love’s fearful, darker side

P. Stuart Robinson (b. 1958), is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Tromsø. He writes academically about the politics of film, and has published in such scholarly journals as Alphaville, Apparatus and Nordlit.

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KVIFF 2024: In love? Then be afraid, be very afraid! Daniele Luchetti’s latest film, screened at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, taps into the paradoxical ambivalence at the heart (pun intended) of human connection. Isn’t this the very nub of the human condition, our capacity to give everything to another but also to take it all away, to love and sometimes, in loving, to destroy?

There is no better encapsulation of the paradox than the Mills Brothers’ standard from 1944 (by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher), «You Always Hurt the One You Love». The song’s governing metaphor puts it nicely: ‘You always take the sweetest rose, and crush it till the petals fall.’ Yes! It’s true! But why…? Confidenza («Trust») at any rate provides a meditation on this thorny question (once again, pun intended).

How do I encapsulate the plot? It’s bewilderingly non-consecutive and riddled, into the bargain, with a rich pageant of imagined calamities. Indeed, imagination looms large, as usual where fear is concerned. Consider how Swedish and Finnish leaders, fearful in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine, must have imagined Russian troops pouring across their Nordic frontiers, and unleashing another round of trench warfare in their own backyards! Why else would they seek refuge in the warm embrace of an expanded NATO? And that’s just an adversary, never mind a lover!

The plot, then, like contemporary security politics, combines elements of the real and the imagined. The journey of the viewer entails startling impressions to which, on closer examination, she must return and reconsider. It’s a disorientating, even confusing experience, which I can heartily recommend. It also means that any attempt to describe the film (warning!) will likely entail a multitude of tiny but significant plot-spoilers. Having said that, the plot is to some extent what you make of it.

«Confidenza» (photo: Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary).

The opening grabs attention in the manner of a classic thriller, with drama, fear, and unexpected twists. The tired old man, Pietro (played by Elio Germano), who had been sleeping in his study, rouses himself and goes to the window. We discover with a start that he is planning to jump. Then a family walks by with young children in tow. A little girl looks up and spies him on the window-ledge. He puts a finger to his lips. Then he relents and turns back towards the interior. We breathe a collective sigh of relief, but a new surprise is coming. Someone has burst into his study, a woman. She promptly rushes forwards, intent on finishing the job he had started.

The compact and compelling vignette of despair, hatred and violence concluded, we jump backwards, and meet Pietro in the classroom as a young teacher. He is engaging, charismatic. ‘How did he get to this sorry pass?’ we are bound to wonder. The audience is already hooked, drawn swiftly and irrevocably into the tale of his life and, as we soon discover, his One True Love.

Confidenza is a film about love and fear – as well as power of course! For it’s the power you fear, and from the outset this is a relationship with a disturbing power imbalance: between gifted teacher and his smartest ex-pupil, Teresa (played by Federica Rosellini). Nevertheless, this is a love affair and a power struggle whose outcome is entirely uncertain. For she emerges as smarter, more resourceful – and so much more dangerous – than he imagines.

In the throes of their tempestuous relationship, in a moment of passion and conflict, the lovers seek reconciliation by means of an avowal. They agree to forge a special bond, a tie of mutual dependence and vulnerability. They will each share a secret, something so terrible they would never reveal it to anyone else. This is the moment when the power dynamics change forever. She is visibly shocked to hear his secret, whatever it may be, and the next morning she is gone.

«Confidenza» (photo: Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary).

Confidenza is a compelling work, invigorated by sharp dialogue and powerful acting performances. The work of the male and female leads is all the more impressive, given the decision to have the same actors play the protagonists at widely different ages. Whatever questions could be raised about their physical suitability, the verisimilitude is nonetheless maintained, and the sense of narrative continuity consolidated. They are operationally believable in their different incarnations.

What makes the film especially engaging is the light narrative touch. Chronological or imaginative leaps are left to the spectator to decipher. The sense of tension is compounded by the pressure on the viewer to reconstruct the plot. Its natural denouement, at any rate, is the long-lost sweetheart’s expected return. Successful, happily married Pietro anticipates this with something approaching dread. What does she have in mind: a gesture of love or a fearful act of vengeance?

I have to conclude with the biggest plot-spoiler of all and yet one that is in a way self-negating, since it constitutes a narrative false trail. The plot only thickens; it never clears or resolves. The uncertainty remains, and no secret is ever revealed, implicitly or explicitly. The audience is left wondering to the very end: What is it he is so afraid of that he would sooner die than ‘face the music’?

The dramatic crescendo, leading perplexingly to a complete impasse, represents the filmmaker’s most conspicuous rejection of established narrative and cinematic conventions. In its bewildering conclusion the film becomes a sort of eulogy to audience self-determination and the filmmaker’s responsibility to abstain from audience manipulation. The effect is to sharpen the focus on the expressions and mechanisms of fear, uncluttered by reference to their ultimate cause.

«Confidenza» (photo: Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary).

No matter, then, what exactly you imagine may happen! The point is you let another human being get so close that you lost your sense of who you are and everything you wanted to be. Then everything becomes negotiable, and all is so easily lost. This applies in different ways to both protagonists. Her towering ‘success’ seems of his making, her life warped and misdirected by his power. She goads him into bringing it all crashing down, while threatening to offer the same in return: to be reunited in destruction as liberation.

I saw two especially striking new films in Karlovy Vary this year. The other was Lilja Ingolfsdottir’s Elskling (2024). These two express the same cinematic dilemma but in radically divergent ways: How to harness the kinetic power of cinematic craft to the project of artistic expression? There are no easy answers, and evaluations are in any case subject to taste.

I had misgivings after watching the excellent Elskling, the story of a relationship gone sour that is really all about the issues of self-esteem that are slowly poisoning it. I wondered if the plot was a little too neatly resolved, the innately intractable problem of being human conveniently stashed in a psycho-analytical box, a toolbox to be precise. The human problem looms even larger in Confidenza but here, in contrast, no resolutions whatsoever are offered. As a spectator I hankered after a little more uncertainty and mystery at the end of the former, and some kind of closure at the end of the latter.

And yet I can’t help wondering if the misgivings themselves might indicate the subtle workings of good and even groundbreaking filmmaking, from Ingolfdottir’s quasi-forensic psychological dissection to Luchetti’s invitation to an open-ended nightmare of terror and desire. In each their own way they throw new light on the human condition, and take cinema down a few roads less travelled, that is, some of the dark neural pathways we may customarily leave well alone. You may wish to entrust these psychological back-alleys to the relative occlusion of the subconscious, but that is a trust that Luchetti will invite you to break.

The mark of a good film, its social indicator, is the lively conversation in the bar or café after the screening, the embodied proof of something worth talking about. In this respect, the questions a movie raises are just as important as the answers it provides. Confidenza has a remarkable capacity to challenge spectators to push their own boundaries and rethink their sense of self and social connection. The conversation starts here in the film itself, between the filmmaker and his audience. Then, it spills out into the café.

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