Berlinale 2019: ‘Hannah’ Starring Charlotte Rampling and Directed by Andrea Pallaoro
The Berlinale hommage to the always outstanding Charlotte Rampling who also received an Honorary Golden Bear, was concluded with a long and lugrubious movie, ‘Hannah’ (2017).
In its pacing and depiction of a solitary woman, it recalls Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, but the crime in this story is of her husband and she is left to deal with her life as the movie goes through her mundane existence, step by painful step.
Hannah drops her husband off at prison, where he is to begin serving a sentence. She then stoically goes about her life, household chores, working as a cleaning lady for a rich family, and taking part in an amateur theater group in the evenings. But signs pointing to an abominable crime by her husband accumulate, and Hannah begins to feel the pressure — people turn away from her and she finds herself very alone … Rampling gives an impressive performance in this dialogue-sparse study of total desolation, with her stony facial expression and a rigor that seems to envelop every fiber of her being. Only once is she allowed an emotional outbreak. The rest of the time, she seems to be in her own prison. In this film by director Andrea Pallaoro, a stranded whale ultimately becomes an appropriate symbol for the protagonist’s despair. In a reserved portrayal of increasing alienation, Charlotte Rampling uses minimalist means to achieve the greatest possible effect. The role garnered her the award as Best Actress at the 2017 Venice Film Festival.
Hannah is daring because Charlotte Rampling is daring. But it is ugly. Showing her years as she undresses, showing her face as a sad plain mask, mostly unanimated by any sign of spirit. It succeeds but it takes quite a toll on the audience,
When Charlotte Rampling was interviewed by Peter Cowie during this Berlinale, she discussed the complex, unconventional characters she plays, who, as she says, she always brings to the screen with “emotional truth”.
This film meets Rampling’s criterion and it is unsparing in its depiction. But as a film…as a story that enraptures and captures its audience, it fails to deliver, and yet, one cannot leave until the end arrives.
Hannah won Rampling the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 2017 Venice Film Festival.
Director Andrea Pallaoro has now two feature films to his name, this being the second. His first feature film, Medeas which won Palm Springs International Film Festival New Voices/New Visions Grand Jury Prize, like his second, played in the prestigiousVenice Film Festival.
Medeas is described in IMDb as “a daring and lyrical exploration of alienation and desperation through the intimate observation of a family’s inner lives and their relationship to each other and their environment. Without moral judgment, it probes the boundaries of human behavior and the lengths to which people can be driven for love and self-preservation.“ It is a story of love and betrayal set in an American West in a family where the wife is beautiful, mute and perhaps deaf, with three children and a working man whose love she betrays.
The film stars Catalina Sandino Moreno, a Best Actress Oscar nominee for Maria Full of Grace, and Brían F. O’Byrne (Million Dollar Baby, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead) a Tony Award winner for the Broadway drama Frozen.
Writer/director Pallaoro’s earlier short film Wunderkammer won six international awards and was selected in the official competitions of over fifty film festivals around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival.
His next film, Monica, about an estranged transgender woman who journeys home to visit her dying mother and reconnects to her past and ultimately to herself has great U.S. credentials thus far with executive producers Christine Vachon and David Hinojosa whose Paul Schrader film First Reformed was brilliant and producers Gina Resnick, Eleonora Granata-Jenkinson, Christina Dow (Hannah) and casting director, Emily Schweber.
