Review: Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso Both Rues and Relishes the Power of the Artist

Abel Ferrara’s film is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched.

Tommaso
Photo: Kino Lorber

Many films have dealt with the highs and lows of addiction, even the challenges of recovery. Less common are films about living at length with sobriety, about the peace it can bring and the lingering absence that an addict in recovery must learn to accept. To live in recovery is to live with a kind of death: of your warped sense of normalcy for the sake of functionality. A quote from Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker piece “The Art of Dying” sums this tension up beautifully and painfully: “If you’re a real alcoholic, you will never feel quite right. Whatever you want will be a little bit out of reach. Can’t handle that? Get the fuck out of here and get drunk.” Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched, which the protagonist manages with a life of fetishistic interiority.

Here, Willem Dafoe again plays a surrogate of Ferrara: a filmmaker, Tommaso, living in Rome, where he can readily finance his arty productions. Early passages linger attentively on the everyday textures of Tommaso’s existence. He sips espresso served to him by a barista who asks him for updates on his life; studies Italian; shops for fresh produce at a nearby market; makes pasta for his much younger wife, Nikki (Cristina Chiriac), and their daughter; works on a script that will eventually turn into Ferrara’s Siberia; and coaches young and attractive actors on the art of feeling pure feelings for a role, without self-consciousness. For a while, Tommaso serves as a straight male aesthete’s dream of the successful artist’s way of being, as the protagonist is a good-looking, authoritative older man who enjoys financial freedom as well as the attention of young women. And he appears to be sensitive and thoughtful to boot.

This lovely idyll serves several purposes for Ferrara. Simply, this atmosphere offers a fulfillment of wishes, as it’s an act of masturbation and perhaps of self-congratulation, an impression that’s affirmed by the several excuses that are made for young female nudity. Yet Ferrara, a significant artist and a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, also understands that Tommaso’s open sensitivity and sensuality are ironically evasive.

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After a while, we notice that we don’t see Nikki and their daughter that often. Gradually, we learn that Tommaso is a recovering addict, going to N.A. meetings that are populated by a few striking characters who offer realistic testimonials to the struggles of dependency. Evocatively, Tommaso talks of once trying to remake La Dolce Vita in Miami with an actor who was also an addict, and he shares a heartbreaking story of a daughter from a previous marriage asking if he was leaving the house, drunk, because of her. Tommaso’s tranquil rhythms are misleading, as we see that the protagonist has insulated himself not only from temptation but connection; his very fear of losing his family is what threatens to drive them away. Underneath his manners, Tommaso feels the alienation, the missing-ness, of living sober as an addict.

Tommaso has a glancing, sketchbook-like quality. Through elegant long takes and stately pace, the audience becomes privy to the entire spectrum of Tomasso’s daily physical and emotional experience. Certain episodes in the film occur with so little context that they don’t seem to be literally believable, yet they aren’t quite visually coded as fantasy, as many scenes in Siberia are. For one, when Nikki is seen making out with a man in a park where Tommaso is playing with their daughter, we can’t tell if this moment is real or a paranoid projection. But the distinction barely matters, as we’re confronting Tommaso’s emotional reality.

Another episode is even more strikingly specific: Tommaso is insulted that Nikki didn’t wake him for a family lunch. In the moment, one is sympathetic toward Tommaso, though Ferrara establishes just how often Tommaso is in his own world, whether he’s teaching classes, surveying Rome, or honing his script; he presents as courtly and empathetic in public, and to himself, while casually thinking mostly of himself, a resonance that Ferrara allows us to gradually discern. Nikki doesn’t check on him because it doesn’t occur to her that it would matter, an instinct that signifies her immaturity as well as his essential selfishness.

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Ferrara has mastered a type of scene in which the ecstatic intersects with the ordinary. In Welcome to New York, a rapist’s prolonged physical humiliation upon his arrest and processing became a casual indictment of the legal system—complicated morally by the fact that he deserved it. In 4:44 Last Day on Earth, Ferrara stages an essay on the comforts of rarefied life upon its impending demise. In Tommaso, we’re allowed to feel both the comfort and limitation of prescribed rituals. In Tommaso’s case, said rituals, which include meditation in addition to his other daily activities, stave off and replace more damaging hungers. Late in the film, a shockingly violent encounter, potentially imaginary, embodies the fear addicts have of reverting to their worst and most impulsive tendencies.

Ferrara’s collaborations with Dafoe, including the extraordinary Pasolini, are studies of privilege, power, fantasy, and loneliness. They’re also surveys of Dafoe’s remarkably suggestive presence and physicality, as well as flirtations with European artiness. Tommaso is erotic in a manner that’s unusual for American films, suggesting that Ferrara has truly gotten Italy into his bloodstream. Almost every encounter here is freighted with the promise of sex—the kind that’s understood to be possible primarily because of Tommaso’s success and station. These wandering, episodic films are politically conscious, yet they’re also about the lurid pleasure of being a man with a certain degree of reputation. In Tommaso, Ferrara both rues and enjoys his protagonist’s power and insularity, which scans less as hypocrisy than as an honest admission of the difficulty of navigating the divide between accountability and temptation.

Score: 
 Cast: Willem Dafoe, Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara, Stella Mastrantonio, Alessandra Scarci  Director: Abel Ferrara  Screenwriter: Abel Ferrara  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 115 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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