Quicksilver Fox

The Wedding Director Directed by Marco Bellocchio at MoMA June 4-9

As we launch into another Bow-Down-to-Hollywood Summer, the Museum of Modern Art offers a series called One-Week Runs that provides big-screen showcases for movies the blockbuster-addicted marketplace won’t accept. This week it’s Marco Bellocchio’s The Wedding Director (showing June 4-9). Any Bellocchio opening is an event, this one is a challenge to how we look at movies and think about them.

As one of the few remaining intellectual auteurs, Bellocchio concocts The Wedding Director to poke fun at the pretenses directors and audiences bring to the movies. A Bellocchio surrogate, famous filmmaker Franco Elica (played by Sergio Castellitto), is first seen being jostled out of a reverie: It’s his daughter’s folk-custom wedding, and a video camera is thrust into his hand. Elica’s commanded to get better angles than the regular wedding photographers—an expectation that prompts his sense of moral, social and aesthetic obligation.

Those recurring themes make this a comedy of obsession like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, only The Wedding Director isn’t just meta, it’s quicksilver: playfully self-critical. When you realize that Bellocchio has worked out a series of sketches that detail a filmmaker’s celebrity status and artistic insecurities, the film’s challenge becomes as funny as it is—always—visually elegant. Cinematographer Pasquale Mari also shot Bellocchio’s My Mother’s Smile and Good Morning, Night and creates similar trompe l’oeil surprises. The images leapfrog outrageous incidents (a casting call that goes from sexual harassment to police harassment) portraying Elica’s anxious paranoia.

Much of The Wedding Director’s amusement derives from Bellocchio overlapping harried reality and frantic fantasies. Elica is enlisted by a Sicilian Prince (Sami Frey) into a sinister plot to undermine his own daughter’s wedding. The Prince flatters Elica’s reputation as “a little one among the big in Italy.” Here, Bellocchio’s narrative invokes the legacy of the Italian artist-nobleman like Visconti and Fellini. Bellocchio is inspired by film culture’s influence on Italy’s daily life (Elica wants to remake Alessandro Manzoni’s popular classic The Betrothed). But this isn’t about cultural hipness; Bellocchio uses film consciousness to address social consciousness.

The Prince tells Elica, “An artist is often a fool, but sees what common mortals don’t. You have, without deserving it, that gift.” When a wedding party tells Elica “We thought you were going to film us Visconti style—like The Leopard,” it triggers his civic obligation—and his resentment. Another leap: The Prince becomes a surrogate for Elica’s own proprietary sense of patriarchy. Meeting the Prince’s daughter, Bona (Donatella Finocchiaro), arouses Elica’s Freudian issues and his atheism. As in My Mother’s Smile (which carried the subtitle “The Religion Hour”), Bellocchio treats Italy’s secular and sacred heritage as personal pressure; Elica’s skeptical regard of film culture and church custom continues the previous film’s scrutiny of religious affect. “Philiopietism” is the big word for Bellocchio’s subject here, as he uses film craft to examine the traditions he’s inherited. The Prince proposes that “marriage is the death of love” yet Elian proceeds to contrive a wedding movie that is still “ritually impeccable.” He promises “The only thing that changes is the style.” In a comic subplot, rebel filmmaker Orazio Smamma (Gianni Cavina) fakes his death so that his latest movie The Mother of Judas can win a critics’ prize. Smamma’s rant against Italy’s incestuous film culture as “All crap, all consolation, only hate and anger” is an apt summation of the contemporary scene. But Elica’s response to this cynicism is bemused intellectual chagrin—a life vs. death leap.

No other director gets more out of actors’ faces than Bellocchio: Once again Castellitto personifies Bellocchio’s comic determination; bringing a silent comedian’s eloquence to the agony of modern awareness (in one scene he lulls attack dogs through pantomime and speaking German). Finocchiaro’s Bona is a beauty with a sad but serene expression, expressing feminine plight in a paternalistic culture. And Sami Frey brings menacing dignity to the Prince; he’s like an eagle casting its intense stare across his shield-like beak and into your eyes. These powerful characters make The Wedding Director an unsettling satire—in part about women’s objectification and men’s scopophiliac privilege.

Bellocchio’s leaping perspectives constantly shift tenses—from exposition to critique. Hidden camera POVs and altered perspectives imply Elica’s personal involvement and worry: Are our lives under surveillance? Directed by others? Are we self-conscious yet helpless? Brave yet fragile? Or is our difficulty in facing these questions a sign that today’s moviegoers have lost moral imagination?

The Wedding Director is the real thing, not a simulation of high modernism as the Norwegian film Reprise has been rashly praised (critics overrate its weak emulation of Jules and Jim style). And this is not a movie for anyone whose arrested adolescence holds that Iron Man is all movies ought to be. Bellocchio’s multi-angled perspectives on Elica’s ethical crisis tease the difference between narcissism and subjectivity. The Wedding Director is truly complex; but that’s also its delight.