Don't Move | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Don't Move *

by Ed Gonzalez on February 7, 2005 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

Buy on Amazon:

Video

In the grand tradition of Gabriele Muccino's Paul Thomas Anderson-obsessed productions The Last Kiss and Remember Me, My Love comes the clueless Don't Move, a vile male fantasy in which a girl's horrific traffic accident provokes her surgeon-father to reminisce about days gone by, specifically the sweltering afternoon he raped a woman after his car broke down on the side of a country road. Timoteo (director Sergio Castellitto) lives in the city with his wife Elsa (Claudia Gerini), whose chilliness ostensibly explains why he takes his aw-shucks frustrations out on Penélope Cruz's Mamma Roma. Her name is actually Italia, but the implication is the same: I am woman, hear me roar! Don't Move doesn't exactly romanticize rape, but it does hyperbolize Timoteo's guilt. In essence, it asks us to sympathize not with the victim but the victimizer, who takes to articulating his guilt in the sand surrounding his beach house. "I Raped A Woman," he writes, a gesture his pretty wife misses as she half-runs past her husband and dives into the ocean. Oh, the humanity! This moment is revealed to the audience via dramatic overhead, one of many examples that the actor-director's concern here is not the horror of Italia's life (she has a dog who apparently eats rats, so I suppose she should be lucky that someone wants to have sex with her, even if it is by force) but the tawdry aesthetic pleasures of his audience: Timoteo "takes" Elsa (from behind, natch) over a coffee table covered in seashells, ostensibly because the rough-and-tumble fuck session is not unlike the man's internal crisis, and when Timoteo's shrill daughter causes a scene in public after a wrestling match, it's implied that her father's obsession with her wrestling career may have something to do with a son having been aborted. Long on visual affections and unexamined smut but short on insight, the film's view of human behavior is as offensive as it is preposterously simpleminded.

Director(s): Sergio Castellitto
Screenplay: Sergio Castellitto, Margaret Mazzantini
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Sergio Castellitto, Claudia Gerini, Lina Bernardi, Pietro De Silva, Angela Finocchiaro, Marco Giallini, Elena Perino, Marit Nissen, Renato Marchetti
Distributor: Northern Arts Entertainment
Runtime: 117 min.
Rating: NR
Year: 2004