Özpetek moves away from his cultural limbo

Following the recent release of two Turkish movies, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s award-winning “Üç Maymun” (Three Monkeys) in Cannes, and veteran director Erden Kıral’s Golden Orange success with “Vicdan” (Conscience), comes another movie by a Turkish director based on family tragedies in the lower-middle class. This time, the characters are Italian and blood soaks the streets of Rome, in the hands of acclaimed Turkish-Italian director Ferzan Özpetek.

Adapted from the best-selling Italian novel by Melania Gaia Mazzuco, Özpetek’s “Un Giorno perfetto” (A Perfect Day) takes an unusual turn from the director’s normal style, delving into more brutal and realistic waters as he follows a not-so-perfect day for two families. The film opens with close-up shots of two cops asking a series of questions to a woman about gunshots that came from the apartment across from hers. Troubled more by cops ringing her doorbell than the gunshots across her home, the woman sets the tone for the movie’s apathy for its characters.

As the cops find out that the tenant of the apartment is one of their own, the recently separated police officer-cum-personal security, Antonio (Valerio Mastandrea), the movie goes back 24 hours to tell the story of the fateful perfect day that led up to the gunshots.
Calm before the storm

Calm before the storm
This is a uniquely Italian film, deviating from Özpetek’s previous filmography of characters stuck in their, and the director’s, cultural limbo. As the film introduces its characters through slow takes, we delve into the world of Antonio and his estranged family. In her award-winning performance, Isabella Ferrari plays Emma, a once beautiful woman who now carries the weariness of an abusive relationship in her eyes. She looks after her teenage daughter and her chubby school-age son, while living with her mother and trying to support her family with three demanding jobs.

With an eerie calm, Antonio follows his wife, his intentions placed somewhere between reconciliation and stalking. In a continuing set of slow takes, we see teenage daughter Valentina discovering young love, her brother Kevin facing abuse from his schoolmates, and Emma’s mother (age-defying sensual actress of four decades, Stefania Sandrelli) re-adjusting to a more crowded life in her home.

In a sub-story, we meet other characters loosely connected to the leading broken family of “Un Giorno perfetto.” It takes time to grasp the connections, but when they eventually become clear toward the second half, the anxiety leaves; in its place a feeling of calm before the storm. Elio Fioravanti (Valerio Binasco) is the stereotypical corrupt, spineless politician of European and Turkish cinema who has recently married a young trophy wife upon his first wife’s suicide. His son, Aris, is a tortured young artist who resents his father’s authority and the tailored life his father imposes upon him.

A different Özpetek movie?
This sub-story of another broken family plays out separately from Antonio and his family, the only connections being Antonio working for Elio and their small children being close friends. Even without knowing that somebody’s going to get hurt in the end, Özpetek sets the tone of the film in melancholy and impending doom. It’s true that Özpetek deviates immensely from the usual style of his previous films with detached characters coming from upper-middle class lives in a distorted reality, a cultural and social nowhere.

This is nowhere more evident than the brutal rape scene that creates a stark contrast to the timid eroticism of his previous work. But still, the auteur manages to create detached characters that require hard work from the audience to empathize. This sense of detachment, at times, prevents the characters from being real.

This might, perhaps, be attributed to director Özpetek’s own sense of identity issues, as a Turk living in Italy since his teenage years and trying hard to be accepted as one of their own in both countries.

Having got rid of his previous films’ characters and stories that stay muted in cultural limbo and opened his arms to lonely and estranged Italians, “Un Giorno perfetto” seems to be the place that makes him feel the most comfortable. That being said, this doesn’t really make the movie his most perfect work to date.