Tommaso (Abel Ferrara, 2019)

Tommaso is a film that virtually compels us to read it as autobiography. It's about an American film director (Willem Dafoe) now living in Rome, who is married to a somewhat younger woman, Nikki, played by Ferrara's own wife (Cristina Chiriac). The couple have a three-year-old daughter, played by Ferrara and Chiriac's own daughter (Anna Ferrara). Tommaso, the director, is in recovery for alcoholism, as is Ferrara, and periodically we see brief sketches of a film Tommaso is preparing, sketches that depict actual sequences from Ferrara's subsequent film, Siberia. So even those of us dedicated to maintaining some textual distance between the artist and the artwork cannot avoid the matter. This is Ferrara's self-portrait as a mostly reformed sinner, struggling for normalcy and striving for redemption.

My own ambivalence about Tommaso as a project comes from the style and approach Ferrara has adopted here. During one of several AA meetings depicted in the film, Tommaso mentions in passing that he'd wanted to do a remake of Fellini's La Dolce Vita. In a way, this is yet another confession in a film that's filled with them. We are in fact watching Ferrara's own crypto-Fellini effort, a sort of combination of La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2. Within an overal texture of casual realism, with domestic moments that recall Cassavetes' greatest outbursts, Tommaso offers strange, unexpected flashes of egocentric fantasy. Dafoe's character is arrested for preaching the gospels, and by the film's conclusion is strapped to a cross in the city square.

In addition to dominating the AA meetings, Tommaso teaches a sort of vague acting / movement class filled with Italy's hottest, most nubile twenty-something women. We see Tommaso working with one woman who is nude, and he eventually makes out with her. Tommaso fantasizes about cavorting with his local barista (Sofia Rania), with her serving him cappuccino completely naked. Tommaso is uncomfortably intimate with his Italian instructor (Maricia Amoriello), and gets kind of skeevy with a couple of the women at the AA meeting.

It's not that Ferrara's love for attractive women is a problem per se, and many of these sequences are there to show the struggle that Tommaso has in remaining an honest family man. There are temptations around every corner. But Tommaso processes this stress in overtly Felliniesque ways, positioning Dafoe as a modern-day Mastroianni, beset by luscious women everywhere he goes. This results in an awkward tone, somewhere between Ferrara's usual artsploitation attitude and something much more realistic and direct. The film wants to tell us something about Ferrara's newfound appreciation for family life, and his anxieties about the possible precariousness of that. 

But the end result of Tommaso is a highly mediated view of Ferrara's wife (and to a lesser extent his child) as characters. So Nikki ends up a projection of Tommaso's frustrations, and the manner in which the film gives her emotional short-shrift is shown through realism, not fantasy. In the end, I guess I found Tommaso far less open than it purports to be. And -- your mileage may vary on this -- I'm just not terribly interested in Ferrara's crises and grievances. Not everyone needs to deliver an autobiography. This artist's strongest work exists on a different frequency.