Parky At the Pictures (21/2/2025)
The latest offering from CinemaItaliaUK is Paola Randi's La storia del Frank e della Nina/The Story of Frank and Nina, a rite of passage that had been described as the tale of `three kids fighting against reality' by the Milanese director who made her name with Into Paradise (2010) and Little Tito and the Aliens (2017).
Nicknamed Gollum because he can only make guttural sounds rather than speak, 18 year-old Carlo (Gabriele Monti) befriends the bleach-haired Frank (Samuele Teneggi) after he stands up to the school bully who has taken exception to the graffiti tags that Gollum makes from the aphorisms that he is forever picking up. Frank is a drifter, who slips into classes at the university so he can learn a little about a lot. He also tells tall tales that Gollum never knows whether to believe (such as the time his grandfather disappeared from a hill where a fully grown tree had sprung up overnight).
Gollum lives in a crowded flat on an estate to the north of Milan, with a housebound father (Alessandro Corvo) and a mother (Margherita Di Rauso) who juggles a job and domestic chores. Living opposite is Nina (Ludovica Nasti), a Roma teenager who was married at 16 to the brutish Duce(Marco Bonadei), who is the father of her daughter, Maria, who Nina takes with her when she goes office cleaning, even though it's not allowed.
She is forever taking photographs with her phone and Gollum loves her view of the world and the fact she accepts him for who he is. He finds an old camcorder at an abandoned building and Nina uses it to film him tagging. When she asks him to babysit, he hangs outside the block where she's working so she can see that Maria is all right. However, she's nervous that questions will be asked about the bruises Ducecauses on her face and that her employers will finding out she's Romani, as prejudice is rife across the city.
Gollum enjoys having a secret friend, but he has to share her when the handsome and charismatic Frank ghosts back on the scene and falls in love at first sight at a junkyard. As Nina wants to get her school diploma, Frank offers to teach her and gets hold of a desk to give her lessons in the derelict factory, with Gollum being left to look on helplessly, when not minding Maria or squirting profundities on convenient walls.
All is going swimmingly until Nina discovers she needs her mother's signaure on the entry form and she wants nothing more to do with her since she married Duce and had a child underage. When Gollum offers to stand in as a guardian, he is rejected by the school principal. Worse follows when Frank and Gollum get caught in Nina's flat and he has to pretend he has come to see Duce because he wants to bring him in on a scheme to strip copper wire from the `industrial cathedrals' left empty on the outskirts of the city. Initially suspicious, Duce is won over when the cash starts rolling in and they form a gang that includes The Count (Giuseppe Dave Seke).
One night, however (which is actually the opening scene), a raid on premises with a nightwatchman goes wrong and the power supply is switched back on with The Count stranded in a flooded basement with an exposed wire under the water. Keen to flee, Duce leaves without Frank, who is trying to figure a way of saving his friend. Gollum feels bad for bailing on him and is relieved when he returns to the junkyard in the dead of night. But he has to watch the tenderness between Frank and Nina, who has snuck away to wait for him after having striven so hard to keep her emotions in check for fear of provoking Duce.
As Gollum narrates, the trio were closer than ever after this and Nina even agreed to pay a call on his grandfather (Bruno Bozzetto), a former police inspector whose house is covered with post-its because he is suffering from dementia. He is pleased to see Frank and dances to jazz with Nina and Maria before everyone has an afternoon nap. But they oversleep and have to flee when Frank's mother (Anna Ferzetti) comes home and pleads with him to stay so they can talk things out. The encounter shatters Gollum's illusion about Frank being a yarn-spinning magician with a solution to every problem and he pushes him away when he tries to explain. But all three end up clinging to each other, as Gollum manages to swear in his despair and they become closer still. That said, Nina refuses to commit to Frank because she knows nothing about him and isn't impressed when he claims people should be free to write their own stories.
When Duce is arrested, Nina gets into a panic because she fears that the authorities will take Maria away because she was conceived illegally. She visits her mother (Maria Halilovic) for advice, but they just argue and she berates Frank for trying to dupe Duce in order to keep seeing his wife. Gollum also needs his faith restoring in Frank and he walks three miles to the hill with the overnight tree and is pleased to see the initials Frank claimed to have carved on the trunk.
However, there is no sign of Frank or Nina anywhere and, when Gollum goes to her flat, neighbour hands over Maria. With nowhere else to go, he spends the afternoon with Frank's grandpa and they have to follow an online video to change Maria's nappy. Out of the blue, Frank leaves a voicemail to come to the station and Gollum realises that grandpa was a stationmaster not a cop when he dons his old uniform and joins them at Milano Centrale.
Frank and Nina have decided to run away and she instructs Gollum to claim paternity over Maria so she can't be taken by social services. However, as they check the departures board, grandpa gets over-excited at being back on his old stomping ground and he starts blowing his whistle. This attracts the cops and Frank's mother and he is about to surrender so Nina can escape when she grabs him by the hand and they scarper, leaving Gollum to wander away unimpeded and ponder a future as a father and a famous artist - because who knows how things might work out?
Lively without quite hitting its stride, this celebration of the power of words is one of those freewheeling features that feels like the director is making things up as they go along. There's a skittishness to proceedings, as though the nouvelle vague has collided head on with the New York No Wave. Indeed, at one point, it feels like Jim Jarmusch had sampled Jules et Jim, while the robbery sequences resemble a Guy Ritchie variation on Big Deal on Madonna Street. This is fine, as Randi flashes her cine-literacy in the same way as Gollum daubs his pensées. But, with the characters landing just the right side of being ciphers with shallow arcs, Matteo Carlesimo's handheld visuals and Andrea Maguolo's restless editing become a bit wearying, especially as there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind the recurring shifts from monochrome to colour or from the everyday to the oneiric.
It also doesn't help that everything feels contrived, from Gollum's spray-can eloquence juxtaposing with his lack of speech to the free-spirited Nina's domestic entrapment, and Frank's ability to be a bohemian sprite without any visible means of support or any let or hindrance. This doesn't mean that Samuele Teneggi's performance isn't alluring, as he brings to mind Christophe Lambert in Luc Besson's Subway (1985). The same goes for Gabriele Monti, as the conflicted Gollum, and Ludovica Nasti, as the child bride/mother who sometimes feels like a fairytaleprincess waiting to be delivered from an ogre by the dashing hero. Yet, for all the evocative shots of the more rundown parts of Milan, this could do with a bit more neo-neo-realism to ensure that the splendid denouement is all the more affecting.