Genova

From the grueling experiences of British journalist Michael Nicholson in a Sarajevo devastated by war, to the incarceration of the ‘Tipton Three’ at Guantanamo Bay, it isn’t hard to see that physical, cultural and psychological displacement lie at the heart of the Winterbottom oeuvre. This time such themes are set in motion by the sudden death of Marianne (Hope Davis), wife of Joe (Colin Firth) and mother to teenager Kelly (Willa Holland) and her younger sister Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine). Pinning hopes of familial redemption on a change of scenery, Joe relocates to the Italian town of Genova, where he and his daughters are helped to find their feet by Joe’s old university friend, Barbara (Catherine Keener).

Genova deserves to be celebrated for its cultural complexity and the concomitant questions of identity it raises. Despite beginning with a mother’s death, it’s less a meditation on loss than an exploration of how personal and family identity evolve in the face of trauma, displacement and the trials of adolescence.

Joe is an Englishman, who, before moving to Genova, had been living in New York with his American wife and their Anglo-American daughters. In Genova, he lectures Italian students on the divergences between Italian and English culture. His two daughters, Kelly and Mary, are in an unfamiliar city against their will, trying to adjust to their new life via desperate and sometimes dangerous means. His friend, Barbara, is an American who educates Joe and his daughters in the history of Genova. She’s single and childless, though seemingly eager to take on a maternal role in their lives.

Each character offers a national and psychological doubleness, an identity-in-process, and pushes us to consider how those identities take shape when geographically and emotionally disrupted. Ironically, Joe’s escapist efforts only bring into sharper focus the trauma that he so wishes his family could forget. Infused with flashes of Nic Roeg’s Venice in Don’t Look Now, Winterbottom’s Genova is a superficial idyll fragmented by confrontations with grief.

Still, it all proves frustratingly predictable at times. Though sensitively rendered by a Colin Firth eager to shed the skin of costume dramas and rom-coms, the timbre of Joe’s mourning – laconic and stiff upper lipped – is brought into one-dimensional cultural conflict with the frankness of American Barbara. This superficiality is concreted by a final reconciliation scene that conveniently serves up closure, where the emotional strands would look better left untied. But that can’t blanch a film that’s ambiguous, involving and very intelligent indeed.

Emma Paterson

Anticipation:

Colin Firth does serious.

Enjoyment:

Impressive performances will keep you glued.

In Retrospect:

Won’t change your life, but it should make your evening.