European Films

Italian veteran director Gianni Amelio rebounds from his disappointing Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House) with his new film La stella che non c'è (The Missing Star), which is mostly set in China. For his new Venice Competition entry, Amelio -- winner of the Golden Lion here in Venice in 1998 with Così ridevano (The Way We Laughed) -- has teamed up for the first time with one of the most versatile Italian actors of this or indeed any time: Sergio Castellitto. Chinese newcomer Tai Ling plays Castellito's character's guide and she easily holds her own opposite the veteran actor despite her limited Italian. The result is an evocative film about not being able to repair everything in life, though that has never stopped anyone from trying. Italian success and arthouse distribution abroad seems likely. 

Castellitto plays Vincenzo Buonavolontà, a maintenance worker at a steel company who worries about a deficient control unit of an Italian blast furnace that has been sold to China. He tries to tell the buyers that he might have a solution to a structural weakness that they are unaware of, but they do not listen to him. Vincenzo is the kind of insistent person with a bad temper whose actions get the Chinese translator of the buyers fired and who, when the buyers do not seem to listen, decides to travel to China to solve the problem. What he does not realise is that the furnace was bought and has already been resold by commercial brokers who are not interested in his vague technical talk and who have moved on to other projects.

Not easily dismissed, Vincenzo goes on an voyage throughout the country to locate the plant that has bought the deficient machinery. The Middle Kingdom is a completely alien country for Vincenzo, and he does not speak much Chinese, which leads him to take on a guide, who (following the law of economy of characters) must be the fired translator of the brokers. There is some animosity between them, but Amelio, who wrote the screenplay with Umberto Contarello, subtly peels away the layers in carefully directed and acted dialogues that ring true and are as much about what is said as about what isn’t. (The screenplay was extrapolated from a novel by Ermanno Rea.)

Over the course of the film, their two characters become fully-drawn as their masks slowly slide from their faces. Aided immensely by Castellitto’s bravura performance and a more than satisfying screen debut of Chinese newcomer Tai Ling, the audience is soon rooting for them to get together. But Amelio has other plans, and this is one of the graces of the film, which avoids the beaten track in favour of an exploration of who these characters really are, what they want from life and how they try to get it. They will not always succeed, but better to have tried and failed than not have tried at all. Amelio’s approach is to tell the story through small, everyday scenes that might make little sense separately, but seen together hit a strong nerve. 

Cinematographer Luca Bigazzi (Romanzo criminale, Le chiavi di casa) once again proves his versatility with a carefully lit palette composed of greens, blues and hazy greys that is unlike any of his previous work and lends La stella che non c’è the air of a Chinese watercolour. Locations are used to full effect, including the Chinese countryside, industrial sites and cityscapes. The film’s ending is both ironic and completely logical and leaves part of the resolution up to the audience, which might delight some (this reviewer included) but annoy others.

Boyd van Hoeij named La stella che non c'è as one of the ten Best Films of 2006.