From the top of a cold tower, the review of the film with Edoardo Pesce and Vanessa Scalera

Making your first feature film is anything but simple. Not only on an economic level, but also and above all on a writing and directing level, to demonstrate, right from the start, that I have something to say. Francesco Frangipane tries with an intimate and personal film like From the top of a cold tower, based on the play of the same name by Francesco Gili, who also wrote the screenplay, and shot in the Umbrian villages. Presented as a preview at the Rome Film Festival 2023, it will be in Italian cinemas from 13 June distributed by Lucky Red.

A unique story yet like many others

There is an impossible conflict at the heart of From the top of a cold towerwhich requires a good dose of suspension of disbelief. The everyday life and “monotony” of a family made up of father, mother and two children are irremediably broken by an incredible medical discovery: both parents have contracted a very rare disease and blood relatives could only save one of the two. The children are therefore forced to make the decision that they would never want to have to make in life: who to save, mom or dad? Meetings with the doctor in charge do not help, exponentially increasing family discussions.

Internal conflict

For the protagonist roles, Francesco Frangipane managed to bring together four talents of our cinema: Edoardo Pesce, Vanessa Scalera, Anna Bonaiuto, Giorgio Colangeli. All four manage to bring the conflicting feelings of their characters to the stage, creating a chemistry that is as familiar (especially during Sunday lunches, full of ideas) as it is fraternal, with an almost morbid brother-sister relationship that the children themselves joke about. Precisely this closeness risks driving them further apart, as they try to understand what the right solution is, if it ever exists. It is often parents who have to choose between their children, but here we travel on reversed tracks with a reversal of point of view. As? Playing with the characters’ “preferences”.

Inner stasis

Despite the psychological dynamismsupported by Edoardo Pesce and Vanessa Scalera, there is a certain stasis in the staging. On the one hand because we are faced with a text for the stage adapted for the big screen, and the theatrical matrix it remains, both in the home and hospital sequences, as well as in those outside. On the other hand because it is as if, precisely because of what they are experiencing, the protagonists have gone out of time and space, into a sort of bubble from which they don’t want to leave because otherwise they will have to make a decision. They procrastinate, theorize, test, anything to postpone the inevitable. A constant fog it pervades the characters’ journey, which is difficult to thin out to clarify, literally and metaphorically. The animal and primordial instinct against that of the thinking being, together with some elements of their past.

A location that speaks

Yet, that dynamism is given bychosen setting, around the Umbrian villages alternating then large open spaces. It is as if the shots of From the top of a cold tower, between shots and reverse shots, represented the feelings experienced simultaneously by the four: they breathe and speak to the viewer, in their own way, if one has the desire and patience to listen. So much so that the film lives more on writing than directing. And the places that become characters in turn, matching those in flesh and blood. As well as animals, for example Pesce’s character’s horse. All this, to arrive at a the final which probably won’t please everyone but which was perhaps the only one possible, in this film of presences and absences, of ghosts and humans. Of wanting and (not) being able.