The winner of two prizes at Venice in 2020, Thou Shalt Not Hate is another film to divide audiences. It won ‘Best Italian Film’ – an outstanding achievement for the début feature film from writer-director Mauro Mancini, working with Davide Lisino. Its star Alessandro Gassmann is very well known so it was less of a surprise that he should win ‘Best Actor’. Still, despite these awards, the relatively small number of reviews I have found include several that are completely dismissive as well as others praising the film highly. I’m still thinking about the film and several aspects of the narrative still puzzle me.
The film begins and ends at the same location, a beautiful lake in what I assume is the foothills of the Dolomites in Friuli Venezia Giulia. A small boy is coerced by his father into a cruel act at the beginning of the narrative. At the end a man visits the same spot to reflect on what has happened in the last few weeks. The scenes by the lake are stunning in their visual splendour with the shots of the mountains almost hyper-real. The ‘inciting incident’, which takes place immediately after the prologue, see a middle-aged, but very fit man, kayaking along a river when he hears the sound of an impending crash on the road that runs parallel to the river. He reaches the accident and finding an injured man in the driver’s seat he phones for an ambulance and starts to fashion a tourniquet to prevent further bleeding. But in doing so he notices the injured man’s Nazi tattoos and pulls back. Clearly he feels guilty when the accident victim later dies. But what is odd is that the ‘good samaritan’ had already told the hospital that he is a doctor and has abdicated his responsibility to try to save a dying man. Would he not be questioned about this? There is instead a line of dialogue in which the doctor says he is sorry, but he “couldn’t do it”. It isn’t clear if he says this to the police at the scene or simply to himself.
The kayaking doctor is Simone, a surgeon at a local hospital in Trieste. More to the point he is a Jewish surgeon who we learn later has recently lost his father, a concentration camp survivor who was forced to work as a dentist for the Nazis. He begins to investigate the aftermath of what turns out to be a ‘hit and run’ driving accident in which the dead man was Antonio who has left three children, Marica 27, Marcello 17 and Paulo 11. Here again I wasn’t quite sure if Simone engineers the appointment of Marica (Sara Serraiocco) as his cleaner or if what follows is partly a matter of chance. Overall this is a film with relatively little dialogue, employing a strategy of ‘showing’ without explanation. Simone seems to be reasserting his Jewishness, partly because of the accident and partly because he must clear his father’s house and in doing so stir up memories. The two families, his own and Antonio’s are both missing a mother figure. The narrative overall resembles a melodrama with a carefully orchestrated musical score and some rather heavy symbolism alongside the photography. Trieste appears almost deserted in a series of long shots. The pacing is slow and Gassmann as Simone is dour and focused throughout. These latter features almost suggest an anti-melodrama. Perhaps instead this is a ‘moral tale’ about guilt and responsibility?
One of the most striking shots in the film is of a large empty synagogue that Simone enters. I did wonder if Simone’s father had been a refugee from Poland after 1945? The film is a co-production with Poland and the theme of immigration would tie in with aspects of Marica’s behaviour. She does not have the Neo-Nazi fervour of her brother Marcello (Luka Zunic) but her negative attitudes to migrants are presented in quite subtle ways. Simone too, at one point gets angry with the migrants on the street who attempt to clean car windscreens of any car that stops at traffic lights.
Overall I thought this was an impressive début feature with strong performances and some interesting images by Polish cinematographer Mike Stern Sterzynski, who like the director seemed to be making his features début. North-Eastern Italy is an interesting region that doesn’t tend to appear that often in the Italian films that make it to the UK and I was engaged with the narrative throughout. The film has just left MUBI and at the moment doesn’t seem to be available on streamers. If it does turn up I think it is worth watching for its exploration of father-son and family relationships, even if it can’t quite work through everything it sets up. The ‘Made in Italy’ season has been interesting to explore on MUBI but the short window of availability is a difficult proposition.
The Case for Global Film 