Andrea Pallaoro Monica Drama • 2022 • 1h 53m

Monica is a silent girl.

Beautiful, with an imposing physique, she drives around in a red coupe but is a painful portrait of an encroaching loneliness.

She returns after twenty years to the family home in Ohio because her mother, suffering from a cerebral neoplasm, will soon die.

A series of unrequited phone calls to his ex-partner, a series of silences, unspoken, unshown, but identified in the path of the work, confirm the director's unquestionable ability to tell in total respect of the 'intimacy of the characters.

The director's autobiographical motives seem to have led him to reflect on the past and the psychological effects of abandonment.

His care for Monica in this case, like his care for Anna in the previous film, also presented at the Venice Film Festival, gives Pallaoro the ontological characteristic of the respect and attention he pays to the protagonists of the stories he tells.

The latter explores the complexity and countless faces of human dignity, the consequences of parental and sentimental rejection, and the impossibility of healing from atavistic trauma.

She also does not hesitate to traverse the precarious nature of identity through the specularity of the experience of an immature age in fieri, that identity subjected to scrutiny by the need to transform in order to live and survive.

The dialogue that Pallaoro builds in his precious works is absolutely intimate and full of modesty and respect; the sacredness of the portraits always returns a margin of interpretation and mystery.

The aesthetics of the faces and bodies deconstruct the portraits to restore a sense of complexity and to shatter the inherent alienation.

Monica, with her eyes, her gestures, her subtracted expressions says everything without saying anything: few are her words, silenced by a fragility of identity broken by the recognition of maternal love.

Pallaoro consecrates with this film, his talent, his rare ability to subtract narrative and acting, inviting the viewer to penetrate the path represented without any voyeuristic forcing with the need, however, to engage his own lived and felt without which it is impossible to grasp works of such sophisticated and refined texture.