Hannah is an endeavor by a young Italian filmmaker to imitate Fellini and Antonioni, charting a visual poem about the paradox of loneliness and the inevitability of alienation in the modern city. In this endeavor, Hannah is a failure. Director/co-writer Andrea Pallaoro’s film thinks it is artistic, minimalist and metaphorical—even a casual viewer can see how hard everyone is trying here—but it is not actually any of these. Instead, Hannah is boring, heavy-handed, without energy and vacuous. It definitely falls far short of the likes of similarly-themed The Nights of Cabiria and La Notte.
Hannah is about the titular protagonist (Charlotte Rampling), an aged woman living in Belgium whose husband is imprisoned in the opening scenes. As an instance of one of the film’s more annoying bad habits, her husband’s crime is only ever hinted at rather than fully explained, as if Hannah is cleverly working to keep secrets from the viewer—but the viewer can piece the puzzle together fairly easily, not that the film ever gives the viewer a reason to really care enough about the characters or the story to put forth the effort necessary. After her husband’s incarceration, Hannah slowly devolves into loneliness, depression and disconnection. Hannah is the chronicle of her quiet, slow demise.
The film features very little dialogue. The basic premise is that Hannah does not have anyone to speak to. Instead, the narrative is driven forward more literally, as the camera tracks Hannah walking or frames her sitting on various means of public transport. As Hannah moves, so does the story. But Hannah only goes in circles: to her part-time job cleaning a rich woman’s house, to her acting class, to the local swimming pool and back to her apartment. She cooks, she showers and she sits on subways and buses.
It is an attempt at slow cinema and does feature some deft camerawork, but unlike the filmmaking of Akerman or Tarr that Hannah is mimicking, Hannah does not trust the audience to follow along. Instead, Pallaoro repeats the same visual metaphors ad nauseam. More than a dozen scenes, for example, feature Rampling and her reflection in a mirror or window, making some sort of statement about doubling, imitation and loss of identity. Rampling seated on a train or bus, isolated, while some other actor in the foreground or background does something more engaging and lively is another oft-repeated image. Yes, it is an odd fact of modern life that everyone is always surrounded by many other people and yet can feel alienated and alone. But there is no reason for Hannah to repeat this message over and over for the viewer, nor is such a claim at all original or profound in the first place. After all, even if the only cultural products that are considered are French-language film featuring a female protagonist with a bad husband, this idea has been expressed since 1934’s L’Atalante. Modernity is weirdly isolating; we all already know that.
In the end, Hannah squanders an excellent performance by Rampling, who is every bit as emotive and talented working in French as in English, as well as worthy craftsmanship from Director of Photographer Chayse Irvin, whose tracking shots, over-the-shoulder framing and capturing of reflections occasionally border on the spectacular. With those accolades noted, the rest of Hannah is just a slog.
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