Don't Move

When his daughter is badly injured in a motorcycle accident and taken into surgery, Timoteo, a surgeon himself, sits down to wait in the corridor. While he waits he remembers a relationship from years earlier: with Italia, a woman from the outskirts, which began in violence and turned into dependence. The film is not interested in love. It is interested in an unconfessed crime: the story he remembers begins with a rape, and the film does not romanticise it, but it does make him the narrator. The discomfort is deliberate and the audience is made complicit in it. The form is in two layers: the cold, sterile present of the hospital and the dusty, hot past of the periphery. The palette separates the two times sharply. Sergio Castellitto directed and took the lead, from the novel by his wife Margaret Mazzantini, with the two writing the screenplay together. The film drew large audiences in Italy. Penélope Cruz plays Italia, transforming her appearance completely for the part, and won Italy's David di Donatello for it. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian melodrama and uncomfortable character portraits. Who it is not for: anyone who avoids scenes of sexual violence. The film shows it early and directly, and keeps the man as its narrator afterwards.