Montedoro at SLIFF 2015: In the City of the Dead, a Lost Soul Searches

Italian writer-director Antonello Faretta’s bizarre yet uncommonly confident debut feature Montedoro is the sort of work that defies description or easy categorization. Loosely, the film follows an older middle-aged American woman, Porziella (Pia Marie Mann), as she traverses southern Italy’s hardscrabble Basilicata region. As she explains to her taxi driver, she is seeking the village of Montedoro, where she hopes to find traces of the birth mother she never knew. To Porziella’s chagrin, said hamlet proves to be a crumbling ruin, long abandoned due to the threat of landslides. Nonetheless, she elects to tarry in the region and search for answers. Thus begins her strange, elliptical exploration of the village and its environs, a journey in which the distinctions between reality, vision, past, and present become thoroughly muddled. Peculiar people emerge, such as a wizened goatherd and a pair of mourning sisters, but to call them characters is perhaps too generous. They are more akin to dream figures who drift through the story.

For viewers accustomed to more straightforward dramatic narratives, Montedoro‘s studied surrealism may be challenging, if not outright tedious. Indeed, the film’s stubborn opacity becomes wearying at times, but audience members who can attune themselves to its eccentric wavelength will find it a rich, haunting sensory experience. Faretta’s focus is less on orderly storytelling than on establishing a mournful, slightly menacing mood, and in this respect Montedoro is a success. Its dusty, borderline apocalyptic landscape is the bleak Italy of Sergio Leone and Paolo Pasolini’s films: an unforgiving realm of of broken stone that seems to abut the Mexican wastes of El Topo. The vibe of Montedoro, appropriately enough, most closely resembles that of the acid Westerns, for like that subgenre it conjures a hair-raising aura as it delves down into the mysteries of memory and death.

Montedoro screens November 12 at 2:15 p.m. and November 15 at 9:35 p.m. Both screenings are at the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema. For tickets or additional information, visit the Cinema St. Louis website.