There are bigger ideas about innocence lost in the coming-of-age stories of Laura Luchetti, once seeing a romance blossom between a migrant and a woman fleeing a human trafficker in her 2018 drama “Twin Flower” and now with her third feature “The Beautiful Summer,” set in 1938 Torino where fascism is creeping up on a young seamstress who can hardly take notice with all the things going on in her own life. Luchetti doesn’t linger on the locales she sets her films in or diminish their importance, but the backdrops prove to be intriguing as a parallel – seismic global events that seem small to characters who have far more immediate concerns, navigating personal situations that take on the importance of the whole world.
“As a human being, I always feel like we’re so small and we’re always facing something something so much bigger than ourselves,” Luchetti said, reflecting on her two films to date. “That’s why also I am so interested in small animals and insects because they have to face a world that is so much bigger than them and they live in a place we never look at, but they’re so fundamental in a life cycle.”
Luchetti has shown a gift for seamlessly moving between the micro and macro, assuming fairly that when you sit down to see one of her films, you know the world is about to change dramatically for everyone, but at the start of “The Beautiful Summer,” Ginia (Yile Yara Vianello) tunes out any talk of the rise of Mussolini when she’s primarily concerned with simply establishing herself upon leaving her mother’s home, sharing a flat with her brother Severino where it’s clear every decision she’s making is the first time she’s doing so for herself. Starting out as a seamstress at an atelier, she finds more entanglements outside of work upon befriending Amelia (Deva Cassel), a model whose willingness to shed her clothes as part of her job both intrigues and confounds her when ingrained ideas about respectability still hold. However, she can’t help but be enthralled by her lack of inhibition, nor see how seductive it is to others as well amongst the set of artists and intellectuals that make up her new social circle and soon she is in the unenviable position of trying to form an identity of her own when any influence on her can only go so far.
“The Beautiful Summer” is filled with sensuality of all kinds as Ginia feels her way through this formative period in her life, one in which international events have made the future uncertain for everyone around her as much as herself, and as the world comes alive with all of its possibilities around her, Luchetti evokes a real tactility of experience for the audience to feel the same. It’s also telling that in adapting Cesare Pavese’s beloved novel of the same name written a few years after World War II ended, the writer/director gravitated towards the friendship between Ginia and Amelia that has the power to transform them both rather than the romance she embarks on with a fickle painter that was the driving thrust of the original tale, knowing which one is bound to leave a greater impression on her going forward. When Luchetti was in New York earlier this year at Film at Lincoln Center’s annual showcase Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, she kindly took the time to talk about the film, which is now available in America on VOD and how to make a period piece that feels as if it’s part of the present tense, as well as how she continues to draw on her own youth spent in the Italian countryside to create such sensational dramas.
What drew you to adapt this novel?
The madness, that’s what drew me, because this is one of the most important authors in Italy. You study Cesare Pavese at school and trying to adapt the work of the master is a little bit of a crazy act. But the novel is beautiful. It’s melancholic, it’s evocative, and it’s intangible, but it has no structure and the plot is very evanescent, so that was one of the first challenges that I had to face. But I love this man, and I love his work. And when you’re in love, you do crazy things. This is one of those.
Did the color palette come to you early on? There’s an intensity here and in “Twin Flower” that immediately comes across inherent to the image.
Yes, my obsession with the color palette is very strong here. It’s a decision that the production designer and costume designer adopted with a lot of grace because I said, “This is the color palette. It’s sage, pale blue, white, ochre, and red only for Amelia at a certain times of the story,” and everything is in that very sweet palette, but all these colors are colors that can become stronger as my main character, who is at an age where she can change, [does]. Some colors cannot become stronger like black or deep red, so there’s a parallel. And my protagonist is a young girl at a young age where the world is her oyster and she can make it beautiful or horrid.
The beauty of that particular age is being on the brink of a precipice, which attracted me to that book because the book was written more than 80 years ago and what struck me is that it’s so universal and modern. That girl was my grandmother, but also my daughter, who’s the same age of the main character, and also my mom. She is also me as a girl who stays in the world and the world is much bigger than she is. She is also a young woman having to face a first desire, and desire is something that I want to study because it’s very rarely tackled, this is the story of a girl who wants to become somebody and wants to make a life, so I found it very modern because the world has changed the way it speaks about subject matters, but the feelings haven’t changed that much.
From what I understand, the clothes became key to detaching the film from the period it’s set in, even though that’s what was worn at the time. How did you go about it?
Yes, because this is a very small film, we had to work with whatever we had, so the first thing I asked the production designer and the costume designer was, “Bring me all the things that are from the ’30s that we use nowadays without knowing their period” — [that’s how we got] the polos, the shoes, the clocks that we use today that are from the ’20s and the ‘30s. Because the bottom line is that this is a film about young people, performed by very young people, and I wanted the audience to be young, so I wanted to shorten the distance between a costume drama on the screen and a young member of the audience. By making these kids look very close to people who are sitting in the audience, I was hoping for them to feel more connected. And this is the audience now who gives me the biggest satisfaction. Some people said to me, even in the furniture or the art bits of the film, you forget is a period drama. I avoided all the lipstick and gel in the hair and all those things that first we couldn’t afford, but second would have taken the film to a different level, and younger members of the audience forget that it is a period drama when they see the protagonists in the same clothes they’re wearing or [have] the same pieces of furniture they have in their houses.
It’s interesting that audiences, particularly in Italy, might have a certain history with Yile Yara Vianello since she’s grown up in fronton the camera as part of Alice Rohrwacher’s films. What ended up selling you on her?
I saw so many people [for that role] — 400 people — and when Yile came on board at the beginning, I thought she was too old. And then I fell in love with her because in Cesare Pavese’s writing, there’s something that is very close to me, which is what he thinks about nature and the cities. For him, the countryside will always save you and the city will always damn you, so I needed somebody to portray that. And [the character of] Ginia was a creature of the nature, somebody who could climb trees and touch insects and run barefoot, while Amelia [played by Deva Cassel] should be a creature of the city, somebody who just lives in the shadows where you don’t know what happens in the mischievous attractions of the urban world. Yile embodied that nature [of Ginia] so well and then somebody told me, but she’s the girl from “Corpo Celeste,” [which] she did when she was 11, so it’s a very humble homage to the work of Alice Rohrwacher, whom I love.
The use of sound in this is also particularly affecting – there’s one scene where there’s a rattling of the looms to mirror Ginia’s anxiety that was quite striking. What was it like to figure out that element?
The sound and the music have to represent the voice of the protagonist because Ginia doesn’t talk too much and the way we developed the sound in the film is that the more she grows, the louder the sounds and the more articulate the sound and the music [are]. So we start with few instruments that becomes an orchestra when she’s hugging her brother in that moment of pain when she says, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” It is the same with sound, she’s somebody who comes from the countryside, so she could hear more [sensitively] than somebody who lives in the city because the countryside can be dangerous and you have to listen to animals approaching.
Are you actually pretty familiar with the countryside yourself? It’s such a strong part of both these films.
I grew up in the countryside and I had a lot of animals. I miss that because then I lived in London and in Rome, where I only had a cat in my house. But my brother and I had cockroaches, serpents, chickens and rabbits. You name it, and I also think that it’s part of the mise en scene [because] the animal life, which is very rarely looked at, is so important as part of a vital cycle of our lives and so often misunderstood and underrated.
What’s it been traveling with the film?
I’ve been on a rollercoaster, and in the last month, I’ve been to Argentina, Switzerland, England, Japan, and now [in the U.S.] and it’s amazing how people perceive it in the same way and at the same time completely different in every city we go. The core of the film is understood by everybody, no matter what nationality they are, or culture, or religion. There’s something there that is very universal to everybody, especially to people who suffered the pain of growing up.
“The Beautiful Summer” will be available to watch at home via VOD and Film Movement Plus on August 9th.