Luce review – enigmatic Italian drama of dreams and drones

Locarno film festival
A young woman’s breakdown – or is it an epiphany? – in coastal Italy, in Luca Bellino and Silvia Luzi’s film, does not surrender its meaning easily

Luca Bellino and Silvia Luzi’s new film is an intriguing yet perplexing piece of work; it’s opaque and indirect, the storytelling appears incomplete and recedes implacably before the audience’s pursuit. It’s a kind of cinema that does not render up its meaning right away – or indeed at all. The keynote of extreme closeup on the lead character’s face is in implied contrast to the hazy distance where the film’s significance is perhaps sited.

A young woman played by Marianna Fontana lives in a tough Italian town on the coast, miserably working in a leather garment factory; she is one of a whole group of women whose job is to stake and stretch out pieces of leather on an automated production line. The person in charge is a man who sometimes hands out punishment by making certain workers go upstairs to work on the “drum”, where you have to heave out great mounds of leather pelt to be transported down to the factory floor via a kind of dumb-waiter shaft.