“Confidenza” is the new film by Daniele Luchetti, based on the novel of the same name by Domenico Starnone, with music by Thom Yorke. The protagonist is Pietro Vella (Elio Germano), a beloved literature professor who, years later, becomes engaged to his former student Teresa Quadraro (Federica Rosellini). To seal their love or their end, they confide a secret to each other. Which?
Daniele Luchetti is back to direct another story (After Lacci and The School) taken from the novels by Domenico Starnone, Confidence. A confidence is what the protagonists of this story whisper in each other’s ears: Pietro Vella and Teresa Quadraro (Elio Germano and the great theater actress Federica Rossellini). One day Pietro, an esteemed literature professor, goes in search of his former student Teresa after learning from some of her friends that the girl had abandoned her studies to become a waitress. Galeotto was a restaurant table, the two meet again, they love each other for a few years, they will love each other for a lifetime. But are we sure that this relationship (which later ended) that continuously comes knocking on Pietro’s door is dictated by love and not by anxiety? Yes, because that secret that the two had confided to each other some time before was what distanced Teresa from the man she thought she knew. A revelation that shifted love, took it away from what they were. But what did they say to each other that was so disconcerting? The film keeps us in suspense until the last second, the buzz in the room doesn’t stop, there are even those who venture some hypotheses on the content of that apparently scandalous confession. The point, however, is another. It matters little what that man revealed, what he transmits to us Confidence it is the peremptory assault into the dungeon of our thoughts by our lady Anguish. Between anxiety and a sense of persecution (Luchetti succeeds wonderfully in the construction of tunnels and closed spaces in which the characters of this story find themselves living), throughout the film we wondered what Pietro had done so wrong that he feared the end of his life if his confession were revealed. Spoiler, no one tells us anything, we reach the end credits without answers and so we turn the gun on ourselves, we wonder about the existence of a secret which, if revealed, could prevent us from living like Peter. And immediately we find something. Because each of us has something that we have never revealed, be it a trivial thing, be it an intrusive thought that has never become concrete, but which, if revealed, in our opinion, would be capable of destroying the house of cards where we have hidden it . Or worse yet ourselves and our “credibility”.
Confidence it’s a film that forces you to look inside yourself, asks questions without caring about the answers. Starnone in Laces he wrote “we have both learned that to live together we must tell each other much less than we hide”; in Confidence secrecy, the hidden thing, has come closer to what is constructed and not real, like a love relationship between two people who believe they know each other and who instead, probably like Pietro and his wife Nadia (Vittoria Puccini), they never really “saw” each other, because they never said anything truly intimate and personal to each other.
I thought: we fall in love with people who seem real, but don’t exist, they are our invention; this woman so firm, with such clear sentences, this woman without shyness, incisive, I don’t know her, she’s not Nadia. The loved one is one thing, the real person is another thing that as long as we love him we never really see. How much time, I told myself, do we waste in love relationships. In recent years I have happily invented a person. (D. Starnone, Confidencep.41)
ANDlio Germano is the rare rose of Italian cinema and for this reason we need to take care of him by giving him roles that allow him to flourish. Pietro Vella thus becomes part of the Roman actor’s best interpreted and successful characters. The distinctive traits of Germano-actor are delicacy and the relationship with the void, the intangible. This was seen in The fabulous young man or in the lightest Magnificent Presence. His velvety contact with the indefinite transforms him on the big screen into an extra-ordinary man/actor. In Confidence when Pietro feels lost, tormented by the idea that that secret could come out and inevitably ruin his career, he approaches the ledge of the roof of his house and, balanced between nothingness and the floor, raises his arms to the sky and shouts , he shouts as loudly as he can as if through those screams he was able to erase the fears that are crushing his brain. And to translate all this into sound, into music, is the lament of the greatest singer of “what is wrong” of all time: Thom Yorke.
