The Wait is the aptly named feature debut from Italian filmmaker Piero Messina. It has a deliberate pace, patiently building tension so that waiting is a necessary component of viewing it. The film rewards the diligent viewer as it features vivid photography, ethereal camera movements, prolific slow motion, a stimulating setting and absolutely tremendous performances from the two leads. Unfortunately, some of the cinematography portends to artfulness rather than being truly artful, there’s heavy-handedness in the imagery and its evocations verge toward the burdensome.
The film begins with a slow-motion pan of an ornate wooden crucifix—crucial visual hints—before the camera finds a mourning Anna (Juliette Binoche), attending her son Giuseppe’s (Giovanni Anzaldo) funeral. Later that evening, Giuseppe’s girlfriend Jeanne (Lou de Laâge) arrives at Anna’s Sicilian villa. Jeanne does not know that Giuseppe has died and Anna is incapable of telling her. Instead, she lies: it was her brother who has died and Giuseppe is attending to urgent affairs his death has created and will return to the villa in a few days, before Easter Sunday. Thus is established the eponymous wait of the film: Jeanne waits for Giuseppe, Anna waits for the right moment to come clean and the viewer waits for the inevitable revelation of the truth and resulting fallout.
The setup seems preposterous. Why does Anna insist on leading Jeanne along, keeping this stranger in her home at such an emotional nadir in her own life? Why does Jeanne accept such a ludicrous explanation of Giuseppe’s absence at the auspicious moment of her first time meeting his mother? The answer is that the women are hopeful rather than rational. They are both burdened by doubt-inducing secrets, waiting instead of acting. Viewers, too, should accept the far-fetched nature of it all and wait. Anna and Jeanne are each blinded by feelings of guilt, shame and longing. While each demonstrates how passionately she yearns for Giuseppe’s corporeal presence, both conjure him spiritually by speaking of and to him. His body may be gone, but the man at the center of the plot still haunts the villa. Perhaps Giuseppe, too, is waiting for the Easter conclusion.
The waiting is a plot device but it gives the film space to breathe, aesthetically. Messina was assistant director on Paolo Sorrentino’s masterwork, The Great Beauty; that experience shows here, as the camera cranes and pans like a ghost through the sets. This is fitting, since the villa is indeed inhabited by Giuseppe’s specter. The camera and its dreamlike movement are often halted by the physical allure of Binoche and de Laâge, capturing their enthralling performances in the process. Is this Giuseppe watching his mother and girlfriend? This is a beautiful film, visually, with fantastic sequences of slow-motion or light-dark contrasts, long takes of the volcanic landscape and the camera’s infatuation with Anna’s and Jeanne’s undeniable physical beauty.
At times, however, the cinematography goes too far. Shots of trees blowing in the wind or a rolling plastic cup do not fit into the overall tenor of the film. These are pretentious efforts at aspiring to artfulness without narrative rationale and they do not work. This is part of a larger issue in The Wait. Messina heavily evokes the giants of Italian cinema, particularly Fellini and Antonioni. The pseudo-ethnographic/vérité Easter procession is straight out of the former’s baroque-set-piece-saturated oeuvre and so is the helicopter scene. The Sicilian setting and disappearance motif are clear homages to the latter’s L’Avventura. The problem is that The Wait is no match for these previous works; by pointing to them, Messina distracts the viewer from the cinematic allegory he is crafting while also making the viewer wish for those superior films.
The climax of The Wait involves an excellently-executed play on Giuseppe’s imminent Easter return. The Catholic imagery—prayer, daily devotion, cleansing, confession, spiritual presence/absence—underlying the narrative finally culminate in resurrection. Anna ends Jeanne’s pining for her partner and her own lamenting for her lost son. The conclusion of the women’s encounter with each other is unexpected, ambiguous and ultimately appropriately unsatisfying. The film closes as a tidy, provocative meditation on faith, redemption and the limits of human relationships.
