When filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher first began conceptualizing her film “Corpo Celeste” that has been screening in the “Spotlight” section at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, she drew upon words written by Anna Maria Ortese, whom she considered one of the most authentic and original voices in contemporary European literature:
“We would never have met a celestial body at close quarters! We weren’t worthy enough! Yet we too live on a celestial body in space: once the label with the name Planet Earth had been removed, the Earth was also a celestial body, or an object of the world above. We were that world above.”
Rohrwacher would use the Italian Catholic Church and their rites and rituals to tell a not-at-all-autobiographical coming of age story. She started hanging out at churches, attending catechism and parish gatherings, but, until Ortese’s words struck home, her muse remained silent.
“It was thus that Marta appeared, an adolescent walking through an unknown city, a young girl who has to find her own way through the world as opposed to a way beyond the world,” is how she remembers it.
And so we meet 13-year old Marta attempting to come to terms with her new environment of Calabria in southern Italy after 10 years growing up in Switzerland. She is a stranger in a strange land as she undergoes preparations for the Catholic rite of Confirmation while continually confronting hypocrisy among the adult population, including her priest.
Although there are ever-so-subtle nods to classic Italian cinema, “Corpo Celeste” is at once modern and traditional with a gentle point-of-view cinéma-vérité style that uses “quiet” to full effect. Originally from Tuscany with degrees in literature and Philosophy, Rohrwacher understates both shifts in temperment and states of grace within Marta’s journey of self discovery.
Epiphanies are announced with little more than a slight turn of the head. Marta gazes over an embankment at a large crucifix swirling a hundred feet or so below in a river eddy after it became disengaged from the roof of the car in which she and the priest were traversing a mountain road. Her expression mimics one from earlier in the film when she catches sight of children playing in a dried-out riverbed. She absorbs, therefore she is.
The fact that Rohrwacher doesn’t hold your hand and walk you through the “meaning” scenarios of her film, that she acknowleges your own artistic and deductive sensibilities in deconstructing plotlines, is rather refreshing after a long stretch of domestic fare where volume and jump-cuts lead you by a nose ring through an ankle-high emotional maze.
Confirmation, “the definitive confirmation of Christian choices” according to the church, is, to Rohrwacher’s understanding, “the first spiritual stand a young person has to take in life.” And it is through Marta that we see the process of that choice unfold. Surely as mature spiritually as any of her contemporaries, and most all of the adults, she arrives at a self-confirmation that grounds her to the celestial body, corpo celeste, of earth.
Her singularly-simple confirmation ceremony, one of the most beautifully-shot sequences in the film, is both a liberation and a welcoming. Despite the bumbling of those assigned to her “education,” Marta had matured and made her choice. She is that world above.
“Corpo Celeste” is one of the 10 Sundance Film Festival Spotlights this year. Its finally screening is today, Saturday, Jan. 28, 5:30 p.m., Prospector Theatre, PC.