Tommaso

Abel Ferrara, USA, 2019

A portrait of a man. A New Yorker living in Rome, a screenwriter who gives acting workshops, a recovering alcoholic/addict, an ageing man with a young wife and a toddler.

Basically, it’s an autobiography with Willem Defoe (who’s great but looks more and more like an old granny, no?) playing Abel Ferrara, and Abel Ferrara’s family and friends playing themselves. If I’d have known that before I went, I might not have bothered to watch it. Using the medium of cinema to explore your past and your relationships can easily result in dull introspective noodlings.

But I really liked this. It’s quite imaginative and does explore the human condition more universally.

At first, I saw my life as an expat in a southern European city reflected on the screen. Rome seems to be very like Barcelona. The metal-encaged lift in the apartment building!! Oh so continental. The big refuse containers on the street corner! We have those. The speaking of the local language badly but trying and getting by on charm. I know these things! I wish my life was as creative and financially secure as his, but I’m working on it 🙂

At times, the style is pure realism. Depictions of everyday mundanity that could have been shot on a home video camera (or phone – get with the times, Alison). Lots of walking down the street. Natural moments with his 3-year-old daughter.

There’s also a lot of talking, often on profound matters. Confessionals in the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Channeling emotions in the acting workshop. The intergenerational couple talking but not listening, shouting at each other and getting nowhere.

Then at other times, Ferrara uses the possibilities offered by the filmmaking artform and inserts sequences of fantasy/dream/nightmare, music and speaking from other cultures, or images of the infinite. It’s done really well, revealing the life of the mind. We get a window into what’s going on inside his head.

Yet I guess this is also the problem with the film. It’s a bit self-indulgent. It feels very old-school, this focus on a complex male protagonist, everything seen from his perspective. Very much like the white male auteurs from the 50s and 60s. Because of this, the women surrounding him are shallow characters full of neuroses. I like the way he explores the role of a father to a girl, but he basically concludes that the women in his life are broken because they lack a father figure. It’s very Freudian.

And Freud was inconceivably awful at comprehending a female mind. Or comprehending that a female mind might be equal to a male mind, or maybe even – shock! – not that different. Ferrara seems to see it the same way. This film would not pass the Bechdel test.

But while there are fantasy sequences of naked nubile women giving themselves to him, Tommaso is also shown relating to females (his Italian teacher, his AA acquaintance) in a non-predatory way, just getting to know them as people with no sexual undertones. That’s refreshing! But a shame it’s taken a man to reach his 60s and become father to a little girl before he appreciates this.