Don't Move

Synopsis

A rainy day. A car fails to stop at a red light. A fifteen-year old girl brakes, skids, and is thrown off her scooter. The ambulance races towards the hospital. The same hospital where the girl’s father works as a surgeon. Timoteo waits as his colleague performs surgery on his daughter. The terror of this extreme event causes him to cast aside his mask of steadfastness, cynicism, model father and husband, revealing an estranged and violent self. In an attempt to fill the silence of coma with words, death with life, he conducts an imaginary conversation with his daughter in which he reveals a painful secret. The seemingly squalid story of a powerful and visceral extra-marital love affair.

What emerges is a scorching summer of many years earlier, a squalid urban suburb, a downtrodden, destitute woman with a high-sounding name – Italia.

About the film

How much time have I spent thinking about this film? A great deal, a very great deal. Some evenings, my wife Margaret would give me a few pages to read. I read them, I followed her character’s steps through the book, as he sinks into an abyss of love, cowardice, and pity, and I was moved. By the poor, mistreated woman, by the well-to-do, solitary man, by the comatose young daughter. As I read of their vicissitudes, I was filled with pity for myself, as a man and as a father. And what shone forth most clearly in the story was the misery of the human condition, the labor of living life. And the poetry. That hint of the sublime and the ridiculous that makes life splendid.

There was that vivid, visionary writing. As I read, I saw the story. As I read, I filmed the story. I wondered whether I’d succeed, not just in telling the novel’s story, but also in filling it with the same moral density. Could I film the thin line that divides good from evil, justice from iniquity? Could I film the overpowering of a woman without adding outrage? Could I film a man’s criminal selfishness without condemning him?

I like to show the closed fist of life, the few things that really matter. Maybe it’s my age – I’m no longer a young man – but I’ve stopped feeling embarrassed. I need to tell stories about the humble, offensive, necessary things that serve life, that allow us to live it with decency.

I searched for locations and actors like a blind man, groping in the darkness, sniffing for a good scent, a good wind. I needed a suburb, and I found a ghost city; I needed an enchantress, and Penelope arrived. I needed heat, and I waited for summer. I arrived on the set like every director, tired of imagining. Tired of notes and storyboards. I said, Action, and I watched what I’d dreamed, what I’d already seen countless times with my eyes closed. It was different – it’s always different – but it was good like that. It wasn’t easy to be both director and actor: the Kleenex around my shirt collar bothered me. For the rest, I must say that the story both destroyed me and guided me. I shouted, I trembled, I smoked like a fiend. And I was afraid of dying before I finished the film. And it was only when they poured champagne on me after the last take that I killed the fear I had of this movie, this touching story, this truth. Editing it was a delight: it was a question of removing the peel and squeezing out the juice.

I have to thank everyone, from the producers to the stagehands, for the special feeling – like premature nostalgia – that they put into this segment of life we’ve passed through together.

Distribution: Golden Scene Company Limited

Release date: November 18, 2004

Category: IIB

Duration: 125 mins

Cinemas:
AMC / Broadway Cinematheque / GH Mongkok/ Palace IFC /UA Pacific Place / UA Langham

Website: http://www.nontimuovere.it