Michael Winterbottom (the name could only be British, no?) is a very interesting filmmaker. Not only does he make a lot of movies, he makes a lot of different kinds of movies.
He made the raucous music-scene drama 24-Hour Party People as well as the tense, true-life drama A Mighty Heart — wrenching a powerful performance from Angelina Jolie in the process. He put real live explicit sex on screen in a non-porno way for the excellent Nine Songs. He adapted Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, as a western, The Claim; he made the unfilmable Tristram Shandy into a highly enjoyable film-within-a-film concoction, A Cock and Bull Story. He has also made hard-hitting documentaries such as The Road to Guantánamo.
Winterbottom manages to make a lot of movies because he does them cheaply and efficiently. In a film such as A Mighty Heart, the hand-held camera, often trapped in a smallish space (which is to say: small crew, few locations), gave the narrative some of its authenticity and claustrophobic power. In Winterbottom’s new film, Genova, unfortunately, such techniques work less well.
Not that its entirely a bad film, or even mostly bad. Much of it is good enough to make one wish it were better. It has some lovely performances, their intimacy no doubt enhanced by Winterbottom’s small-scale method of filmmaking, and the movie holds one’s attention for most of its length. I just got tired of that slightly soft look that often comes of shooting in natural light, the over-exposed contrast of the outdoor episodes and the pinky-yellowy glow of the indoor scenes.
As you might have guessed, Genova is set almost entirely in that city — Genoa to most Anglophones. It’s the place to which bereaved dad Joe (Colin Firth) removes himself and his two daughters, teen Kelly (Willa Holland) and 10-year-old Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine), in an attempt to get away from some of the associations of the past. But the past, in the figure of the dead mom, is as present in Genova as anywhere else.
Firth and Haney-Jardine, in particular, give fine performances. The rapport, loving yet uneasy, between father and daughter is palpable. It is offset, too, by the more straightforwardly difficult relationship between Joe and Kelly, who is being as much of a teenager as she can be — and, with all those cute Italian youths about, who can blame her? And then there’s Catherine Keener, beautifully portraying a supportive friend.
Certainly, Winterbottom has got sterling work from his actors, and that is the chief joy of the film — he gets a great performance from the mazy streets of old Genova, too. The theme is loss, obviously, and how past losses can echo into the future. That part is marvellously well done. But, after a certain point, the film becomes repetitive: it goes round in a circle like a person lost in an unfamiliar place.
You feel as though you’ve observed some real people here in Genova, and the lack of a determined narrative drive works, for most of the movie, to enhance our sense of these characters in their spaces rather than pushing them through a plot. Sometimes that is enough. In the case of Genova, though, one is left wanting something more, something that has got lost — or was never quite there.