SXSW Film Reviews
The Catholic machine gets another working over in this Italian coming-of-age story about a young boy and his love for the house servant.
By Kimberley Jones, Fri., March 16, 2001
Lontano in Fondo Agli Occhi/An Impure Glance
D: Giuseppe Rocca; with Giusi Saija, Andrea Refuto, Mariagrazia Galasso, Antonio Pennarella. (35mm, 95 min.)The Catholic machine gets another working over in this Italian coming-of-age story about a young boy and his love for the house servant, a brash, sexually loose young woman. At church and at home, the little boy is throttled with the notion that man is evil, and his coming of age consists of his own induction into that "evil." Every inch of this film is washed with a religious fervor and fear, manifest in needlessly surreal, often apocalyptic visions and bedtime "lullabies" chronicling God's wrath. But there's nothing revelatory in it, making for another tired exercise in Catholic guilt. The picture takes on the same look of the rubble and crumble of this postwar village, making for a dingy, dishwater-looking film that's on the same par of tedium as a dozen Hail Marys. (CC, 3/17, 5:30pm)
