| As classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window have shown, glimpsing another’s life through two layers of glass can have a profound effect on whomever does the looking. What is obscured and what is seen become tangled in unexpected life lessons and questioned perceptions. The Italian film La Finestra di Fronte (Facing Windows in English), directed by the Turkish filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetec, again shows this to be true in an eloquent take on the familiar premise that balances love, loss and hope with the mystery of what is only partially revealed.
The opening scene is filled with the tension between inviting warmth, sudden violence. A dimly lit, cavernous bakery is filled with a floury glow, newly formed loaves arranged in rows on wooden boards ready to be slid into a golden hearth. Two male bakers dressed in white should lend a feeling of benevolence to the scene, but the fear in the face of one of them, along with a sorrowful soundtrack, colours the mood with foreboding. Sure enough, within minutes, the fearful one attacks the other with a knife, spilling red blood onto the white flour before running from the room. The last frame in the scene is the print his bloodied hand leaves on a wall in a narrow alleyway. He leans there momentarily before running frantically down a street punctuated with cars and people that establish the era as early 1940s, during the Second World War.
Viewers are left to question what they have witnessed while the passage of time is marked by the bloody handprint fading into the patina of the wall, and we join an arguing, unhappily married couple circa 2003 as they pass by that same wall. The fundamental differences in their thinking become evident when they find a confused old man (Massimo Girotti) wandering the street, lost. While he has no recollection of who he is or where he lives, Girotti envelops the character’s bewildered state in a layer of sage-like dignity. The husband, Filippo (Filippo Nigro), wants to help him, while the wife, Giovanna (Giovanna Mezzogiomo), does not want to get involved.
However, they do take the old man in and, as could be expected, he has a more profound effect on Giovanna than on Filippo. Her unhappiness, born of thwarted dreams, financial panic and the waning passion in her marriage, is deftly communicated by Mezzogiomo through her furrowed brow and the way she snaps at her two children. In the last, dark hours of the day, she gazes out her kitchen window at the handsome man who lives in the apartment across the street.
The old man, in the ramblings and remembrances of a past that he projects onto the present, unwittingly brings Giovanna and the man across the street, Lorenzo (Raoul Bova), together. This creates for Giovanna an opportunity to see her life from the other side of the window, as it were. Unfortunately, we lose sight of Filippo in the process, as his character fades into the shadows and remains unresolved to the end. Giovanna, meanwhile, finds the path she didn’t know she wanted, due in no small part to words the old man doles out to her in brief moments of lucidity. What he has learned through his own loss is not fully understood until the last scene, which revisits and reveals the scene in the bakery. He passes this lesson on to Giovanna, tying together his past and her future in unexpected ways.
This is a heartbreaking film that is as dreamlike and romantic as it is rooted in unglazed reality. The narrative is revealed in glimpses through real and metaphorical windows into the lives of three people, which give the film its brief moments of obscurity, but also its poetry. |
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