FILM OF THE WEEK
INTERVIEW | review: I giorni dell'abbondono (Days of Abandonment) |
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| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Monday, 20 November 2006 | |
 In Roberto Faenza’s I giorni dell’abbandono (Days of Abandonment), prolific Italian actress Margherita Buy gives a performance that lends some sparkle to an otherwise convoluted and unoriginal story, which has been adapted by no less than four writers and the director from a novel by Elena Ferrante. Buy is a literary translator who has abandoned her hometown to start a new life with her husband in Turin (also Faenza’s hometown). Apparently happily married with children, her husband (Luca Zingaretti, who earlier played a mafia-defying priest in Faenza’s Alla luce del sole/Come Into The Light), one day announces that the needs to be alone because his life lacks meaning. Stunned, it takes Buy’s Olga a while to realise that her husband has simply dumped her for one of his much younger students. What follows is a melodramatic mediation on trying to re-find your equilibrium after everything that you thought was fixed in your life has come apart because of an unsuspected “lack of meaning”. It involves a lot of crying and feeling helpless, as well as becoming more interested in the neighbour, a foreign cellist with an exploded hairdo (played by Bosnian composer Goran Bregovic, who also wrote the film’s score). The reason to go and see I giorni dell’abbandono is one: Buy. The melodramatic plot is a little too contrived (especially in its use of foreshadowing elements of doom, including a homeless person on the streets and a dog) and the film has more endings than Return of the King: The Extended Version, but there is one reason why interest never flags and that is Buy’s magistral performance. The actress has essentially made a career out of portraying women in marital crisis (Manuale d’amore/Manual of Love, Il caimano/The Caiman), but not since her riveting turn in Ozpetek’s Le fate ignoranti (His Secret Life; in which she discovers that her late husband also had a homosexual relationship during their marriage) has she created such a memorable and complex character. Her Olga is much more interesting than the somewhat trite screenplay in which she seems stuck, and enough of a bravura performance to recommend the film to those interested in a finely etched rendition of yet another troubled woman in Buy's gallery of fearless performances. This film was screened as part of the 2005 Venice Film Festival.
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