Un château en Italie, 2013, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (© Guy Ferrandis - SBS Productions)

Premiere:

"Un château en Italie" by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

April 30, 2014

 

French-Italian actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi activates her parallel career – directing films – only with great intervals between projects: Un château en Italie (A Castle in Italy, 2013) is the third work she has directed since her debut in 2003. But in spite of this slender oeuvre, Bruni Tedeschi has already established a very personal tone: just as her onscreen performances, her filmmaking is a high-wire balancing act between obvious comedy and the serious exploration of personal and working relationships in bourgeois bohemia.

Un château en Italie, which will receive its Vienna premiere at the Film Museum, is a highly autobiographical work – including as one of its themes Bruni Tedeschi's long-running relationship with Louis Garrel (who plays a version of himself); her own mother, Marisa (a concert pianist in real life) stars as her fictional mother. The ambience and somewhat tragic events of the movie are also patterned after Bruni Tedeschi’s own life experiences. At the same time, she has learned the lessons of the classical Comedy Italian Style: as in the finest examples of that 1960s tradition, common human fabric is made recognizable through particular individual threads. With its continual intermingling of intimate, grotesque, sad, and romantic moments, Un château en Italie poses this liberating suggestion: perhaps it is not necessary to "conquer" the challenges of our existence, but rather to embrace them with all of their contradictions.