"Who would be so foolish as to die without having at least made the circuit of their own prison?"

( Marguerite Yourcenar)

A young woman, during a family ceremony; her gaze stops on a drone hovering above the scene, capturing the innocence of a festive moment. From this appearance, from this mechanical eye that pierces the curtains of the everyday, an idea – or perhaps an uncertain and fragile possibility – sprouts: the use of this device to bridge the distance between her and a father now far away, imprisoned in a prison of time and space. A contact that could erase the abyss between them, but also lead to a new and perhaps more painful disillusionment. Or perhaps, all of this is nothing but a vain illusion...

Luce’s world is a liminal space, suspended between reality and dream, between the desire for redemption and the anguish born from the awareness of an insurmountable finitude, traversed by a light that never shines definitively but disappears and reappears, almost like a distant echo of a meaning that will never fully reveal itself. The existential condition of every individual: the uncertainty of existence and the incessant search for a meaning that never arrives, the dialectical tension between the visible and the invisible, between what we can understand and what eludes us because being is thrown into the world without a guide.

Marianna Fontana’s performance, which brilliantly carries almost the entire weight of the film, is an exercise in radical introspection. Her face, captured by the directors in long takes, becomes the stage where her solitude unfolds, a world of emotions distilled in every glance and breath. This is not just a performance, but an experience of dissolution and search: the daughter trying to reclaim a bond broken by time and constraint, but perhaps no longer even exists, except in the depths of an unattainable desire. In this, the shadow of a previous obsession is reflected, that of a parent who, in the directors' previous film, got lost in the figure of a similarly elusive daughter. Here, the obsession is reversed: it is no longer the parent who acts, but the daughter who seeks to find a father who may never have truly been present.

“The need that led us to tell this story,” the directors said, “is perhaps biographical. It speaks of power relationships. And once again, we’ve chosen the relationship between a father and a daughter. These are the themes we address, family as the starting point of revolution. And as the arena, that southern Italy that encloses so many worlds: a place of moods, multifaceted landscapes, cold and mountainous places where the horizon is also physically hard to see. We wanted our protagonist to be enclosed in a nameless place, like the protagonist herself. It’s not the South that is told, but a dark South, because that also exists.”

The use of wide apertures causes the surrounding world to dissolve into the indefinite, just as the protagonist is forced to reckon with a reality that escapes her understanding, yet remains part of her. The staging becomes an act of metaphysics; like every unsaid word, like every restrained gaze, the truths remain restless, suspended in a gray, suspicious zone, between trust and betrayal, between memory and fiction. Reality is nothing more than a game of mirrors, a space of tension in which the protagonist tries to identify the mystery of her existence.

Every place that composes the universe of the film – the prison, the family setting, the solitude of daily life – becomes a symbol of enforced existence. The prison is never just about walls and bars: it is the condition of those who live but are never fully free. The protagonist moves between these cages: between the alienating work in a tannery and the prison where her father is confined, between the indifference of a home that becomes a prison and the search for a bond that might never be fully restored.

Throughout the film, light appears as an ephemeral presence, an unfulfilled promise. It is a reflection that makes truth seem close, yet it always remains distant. The desire to transcend the ordinary and find a meaning that is never attainable.

And yet, in this chaos, the possibility of redemption passes through the illusion of communication. A drone, a cellphone, a video of a communion – these seemingly banal tools reveal themselves as vehicles of hope, connection, and (re)construction of a human bond. But the film merely skims the surface of this desire for liberation, never granting the audience the possibility of a definitive conclusion. The act of speaking, of communicating, transforms into an agony, a moment of suspended tension, where every word is more a suspicion than an answer. Uncertainty becomes the fabric, revelation becomes ever more elusive, like the face of a father we never see, like the daughter who is never fully seen, because it is only in silence and distance that the existential drama unfolds.

“You must never call me,” the father says with a severe and sarcastic tone, “fathers are strange, we prefer to become ghosts, we’re better at it.”

A film where children disturb and children are always a problem.

From an aesthetic point of view, Luce is a film that makes light itself its protagonist, while remaining faithful to the ambiguity of its symbolism. The shots are mostly intimate, claustrophobic, and light is used similarly to how a painter would use chiaroscuro: not to resolve darkness, but to emphasize the tension between the visible and the invisible. The spaces are often cramped, as if reflecting the mind of the protagonist, who moves in a world that always seems to slip away from her, just like the meaning of her existence.

“We wanted to continue telling the relationship with power, whether it’s a father or a master,” explain Luzi and Bellino, “that power that crushes you when it’s family and alienates you when it’s work. We tried to do this through the turmoil of a young woman in a context that wants her to be a worker, ignorant, subordinate, and leads her to make an unhealthy choice in search of an absence and a voice that becomes a parallel life. Perhaps invented, or perhaps truer than the truth. The method of working is what we love: a script rewritten day by day, real locations, real people, shot in sequence, acting that is no longer fiction but the staging of oneself.”

The film is structured in a play of blurriness and shadows, constructing a parabola of growth and disillusionment that touches the depths of the human. The liberation that is glimpsed is a partial liberation, an act of resistance to the meaninglessness of existence. If the film may seem an act of disillusionment, it is actually a declaration of faith in desire: “Desires are better than promises.” It doesn’t matter if the search for a father will never have an answer, what matters is the desire to find, to speak, to live beyond pain and solitude. And it is in this search that the film elevates itself, reaching its purest form: existential drama mixes with political and social truth, and cinema itself becomes a metaphor for a continuous struggle for meaning in a world seemingly incapable of providing it.

The film ends with a sense of incompleteness, of a search that will never reach its conclusion, much like the journey of existence itself. The “light” is, above all, an ambiguous symbol, the manifestation of a search that, in its progression, seems to lead not to a true revelation, but rather to an encounter with the void hiding beneath the surface of things.

A grainy portrait, a reflection of oneself in which one sees oneself, perhaps desperately for the first time, perhaps even the only time. A film in which perhaps there is nothing to say, nothing to explain: one simply needs to attune to one's own feelings, to the images that veil almost everything and perhaps, for that reason, refuse to affirm anything.

“No dream has ever been as senseless as its explanation.”

(Elias Canetti)

15-Jan-2025 by Beatrice