A Magnificent Haunting (2012)

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Once again Ozpetek takes us to a magical place, and entrances us with a sensitive and inspiring film. His two most famous films are probably FACING WINDOWS (2003, see my review) and SACRED HEART (2005, see my review), which are both classics and masterpieces of world cinema. His film LOOSE CANNONS (2010, see my review) is marvellous without quite being a classic. This one is somewhat better. It is difficult to describe, because it combines genres in a bold and astonishing way. Ozpetek took many risks with this film, which in the hands of a lesser director could have collapsed into a heap. But, as usual, Ozpetek makes the impossible work. The lead actor in the film is Elio Germano, who plays the character Pietro. He is utterly charming and delightful, and he holds the film together wonderfully. Germano has appeared in 49 films despite being only 34 years old, so he is a consummate professional. The entire cast is excellent, and there is a magnificent and tragic performance by Anna Proclemer as the elusive and mysterious Livia Morosini, whom Germano has to seek out under a false name in order to discover the truth of what happened in 1943. She was 88 at the time she played this, her very last role, and she died a few months later, in 2013. She was a magnificent actress but she only made 21 films in 60 years. However, those roles that she did play included George Sand, Annie Sullivan (the woman who taught Helen Keller, as portrayed in THE MIRACLE WORKER by Anne Bancroft in 1962), O'Neill's Anna Christie (originally portrayed by Garbo on screen), and Nastasja Filippova in an Italian TV series adaptation of Dostoevsky's THE IDIOT (1959, not to be confused with the modern Russian series based on that novel). The story of this film mixes fantasy with reality, always a dicey business, but Ozpetek gets away with it. Germano is thrilled when he finds a house to rent in the Monteverde district of Rome at an affordable price. But what he does not realize is that the property is haunted by a group of people who all died there in 1943 but who are trapped in the house and unable to move on. Germano is a lonely fellow, and he comes to accept the presence of the ghosts and interacts with them; they all speak to one another normally, but others cannot see them. This may sound absurd, but Ozpetek's sense of humour and whimsy results in our accepting the absurdity and watching the film sympathetically as the events unwind. Germano takes on the task of finding out what happened to the ghosts, how and why they died, and who betrayed them, because until they can realize this themselves they are stranded. So yet another layer of the film then takes shape, namely the solving of a historical mystery. This film interweaves humour, pathos, tragedy, comedy, fantasy and reality. That is a lot of threads to draw together, but it succeeds. The underlying unifier to all of this is Ozpetek's warm and gentle sense of humanity.

Ferzan Ozpetek's latest film is a modern ghost story, with its protagonist a young gay man (an actor-to-be), only this time, the sexual orientation drama leaves its spotlight to the haunting possession of a big family of dead theatrical actors who are trapped in an old house and disconnected from the real world, eager to find out who is the whistle-blower imputed to their tragic death during the WWII. MAGNIFICENT PRESENCE has a resourceful collection of fodder, such as romance, haunted house, ghost retribution, gay-transvestite subculture, war-time friction, light comedy and so on, two dozens of characters at hand to deploy with, but the film never quite find its centre of gravity, it leaves many loose ends which frustratingly no one minds to care. But eventually it can pass on as a moderate piece of work thanks to Elio Germano, this promising leading man in the recent Italian film scene, is the worthy saviour, he has won BEST ACTOR in Cannes 2010 for LA NOSTRA VITA (tied with Javier Bardem for BIUTIFUL). Elio owns the entire film, injecting a quirky laid-back energy into his character while grappling with heterogeneous accidents and happenings around him (an eerie transvestite/transsexual sweatshop with an obese kingpin is the wackiest among them all), his innocuous look and infantile personality renders the film a whiff of fairytale evocation. Anna Proclemer, a veteran Italian actress in her late 80s, takes on a key role which will solve all the mystery, has successfully exuded a fierce body of work in her limited stint. Otherwise, all the other supporting roles are more or less underdeveloped (including an ever-so-graceful Margherita Buy and a scene-stealer Mauro Coruzzi, a middle-aged transvestite). I have watched quite a lot films from Ozpetek (arguably he is my favourite current Italian director though he is Turkish), the best ones are LOOSE CANNONS (2010, 8/10), SATURN IN OPPOSITION (2007, 8/10), FACING WINDOWS (2003, 8/10) and THE IGNORANT FAIRIES (2001, 8/10), MAGNIFICENT PRESENCE by comparison, has to degrade itself as a less achiever, but against all odds, Elio Germano and Anna Proclemer are the newcomers on my top 10 list this year (BEST LEADING ACTOR, BEST S. ACTRESS).

Even though some ideas can be appreciated, nothing is really new. A haunted house? Victims of Nazi racism? A difficult life for a gay young man? Mobbing in a solicitor's office? A thousand films have dealt with this in a more profound way.Adding a cameo with Platinette as a sort of a metaphysical seer surrounded by transvestites is not enough to turn a quite superficial story into an Almodòvar-style comedy.If the director wants to go all the way, then let him go all the way. But I have not seen the courage to push the story to its extreme possibilities; Ozpetek is satisfied with giving us a quite ordinary and reassuring fairy-tale with a sort of a happy ending.Let's just think about all the plot opportunities suggested by a group of people from the 1940s brought into the 2010s...all the director does is letting us know that the young son of the Turkish couple is still alive!Germano is on the scene from beginning to end, and I must say he is not bad at all. The actors around him, on the contrary, look stereotyped and without a real insight on their character. Definitely not the best I have seen from Ozpetek.

A masterpiece of Ferzan Ozpetek that finally, after years, departs from his usual production. The plot is developed in a fun and fluid matter, and it is impossible to be bored or get lost along the way. Also perfect character development, very credible thanks to the extraordinary performances, one of all those of Elio Germano; his close-up in the final scene is an apotheosis. Great mastery of the musicians in recreating a magnificent soundtrack of the years Thirty that it falls within the context perfectly. There is not a flaw in the entire movie except, perhaps, that the ending is almost trivial and I would rather different. All in all a great movie to recommend highly!