Jude (Adam Driver) and Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) meet in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant in less than desirable circumstances: he has not done much to help the place’s stench, and the doors are stuck closed, leaving them alone with the aforementioned odor, mock-hopelessness and each other. It’s anything but a meet cute, but it certainly seems to function as one; shortly thereafter, they are sleeping together, getting married, and preparing to raise their first child.
At this early point in the story, Hungry Hearts is shaping up to be a rather innocuous film, elevated by director Saverio Costanzo’s dramatic staging and the performances of Driver and Rohrwacher. But this romantic-comedy in the making is, as the anti-meet cute at the beginning warns us, anything but what it appears to be.
Instead, it becomes a thriller about mental illness, with Mina deciding she does not trust doctors to take care of her prenatal child. It seems at first to be a minor roadblock—she isn’t eating as much as she should and doesn’t like ultrasounds—but it quickly becomes more than that. Following a narrative ellipsis in which the child is born, the real story begins: Mina is horrendously overprotective, refusing to take her son outside in the first seven months of his life and feeding him only plant products, resulting in stunted growth.
The sociological concerns of the story repeatedly come to the forefront, with the health benefits (and lack thereof) of veganism, vegetarianism and of listening to doctors recurring at multiple points because Mina, seduced by fortune-tellers speaking of an “indigo child” and by notions of purity that make even Carol from Safe look like a slob, adheres staunchly to her values regardless of the danger they pose for the nameless son. She is the mother, she repeatedly reiterates, and therefore she knows what’s best. Jude loves her but tries his damndest to take control, and again the gross-out intro is recalled as foreshadowing: their relationship is toxically claustrophobic, and their only hope of escape is if Jude is able to get hold of someone who can help them. With each of these values and shortcomings tied to female hysteria, Hungry Hearts borders on the misogynistic.
The film places our sympathies firmly with Jude, departing from his point of view mainly to show the harm that Mina inadvertently does to their child, and even when he hits her, the impression left is that he is basically a nice guy who would never really hurt her. Hence – in a crucial moment – we are led to believe that he was not responsible for a serious fall that Mina takes (the camera, for its part, obscures the action) and that she uses the presumed accident to cast him out—a decision the audience knows will kill the child and, as such, calls for an apparently sympathetic bout of vigilantism.
Serious social issues are treated ludicrously—the number of preposterous plot developments are countless, but, I suppose, should be accepted for the sake of the film. Perhaps more significantly, they are inflected with the semantics of psychological thrillers and horror films, most noticeably in the score and use of high-angle distortion lenses, the latter of which becomes an unrelenting stylistic tic after a particularly dramatic reveal. If not for the ridiculousness of the message and the lack of realist grounding for the plot developments Hungry Hearts would be offensive. You have to ask what led Costanzo to take issues of vegan parenting and overprotective mothering into such unexpected generic territory.
While the unexpectedness is commendable, you get the sense that Costanzo is less interested in reconfiguring and reworking genres than with hammering home political/sociological agendas. Indeed, the film’s total lack of a world that does not pertain directly to the narrative—whatever happens in the timely ellipses, Jude’s profession, the name of the son, Jude’s mother—attests to a film dedicated to propaganda without aestheticism.
On a more positive note, Costanzo’s New York is not like the New York shot by so many microbudget independent filmmakers working in that city, and although his fisheye lens is overdone and too on-the-nose, he deserves credit for his handling of the film’s visuals.
Likewise, Driver’s turn is particularly pleasurable; he and Rohrwacher were awarded at the Venice Film Festival. To the overwhelming majority of us he is the boyfriend of Hannah on Lena Dunham’s Girls. His performances since then, including a memorable role in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, have never been able to shake off that role, and he has come off as the guy who does his (very funny) thing very well. Save for the opening scene and a scripted outburst or two (when Jude discovers his wife’s misdoings), he sheds his prevailing image and succeeds as a dramatic actor. All this means that Hungry Hearts is not without its merits, and, in a small handful of scenes, it’s even not without its thrills, but neither helps to shake off the sour feelings caused by both the politics and the lack of aesthetic scope.