La Sapienza

Eugene Green's 2014 film follows a French architect who has lost his inspiration. Alexandre travels to Italy with his wife to finish a book on the seventeenth-century architect Francesco Borromini that he began years earlier. On the way they meet a young brother and sister, and the two couples separate. The form is deliberately artificial. The actors speak looking directly into the camera, the sentences are measured and slow, and there is almost no gesture. Green uses this as a method rather than a stylistic preference, drawing a relation between the symmetry of baroque architecture and a way of speaking. The rivalry between Borromini and Bernini is the film's intellectual ground. How light enters a building, how space changes a person and whether art can be taught are all argued. The buildings in Rome and Turin are shown at length. Who it's for: those interested in architecture and formally unusual cinema. Who it's not for: viewers looking for naturalistic acting; the film refuses it deliberately and will lose some people at the start.