The Staggering Girl

Great film for those who are not afraid of images doing more storytelling than the script itself. The Kyle MacLachlan character does bring to mind a Twin Peaks atmosphere and Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is just sublime to top it all off.

This enigmatic little memory piece may be only 37 minutes long but it still typifies the worst kind of art-house. A superb cast, (Julianne Moore, Marthe Keller, Kyle MacLachlan, KiKi Layne), mooch about in the past and in the present but none of them manage to engage us on any level other than the banal. The director is Luca Guadagnino and this must rank as nothing more than a doodle on his CV, the kind of film that established film-makers with too much power and money, but perhaps limited imagination, make simply because they can. If, like me, you admire the director's other work it's best you give this one a miss.

This movies was quite to be bit boring. Francesca decides to leave New York and go to Rome to reconnect with her estranged mother, who still lives in Italy. Luca Guadagnino collaborated with an Italian Fashion brand, Valentino. I think that this film was not quite better, unlike his longer films like Call Me by Your Name and many more, but the soundtrack was good and composed by the famous Ryuichi Sakamoto. The garments serve as a cognitive jump-start for Francesca and summon memories of a complicated adolescence, of men that have passed through her life and the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom was beautiful.

'The Staggering Girl' brings together a group of creative geniuses. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, a filmmaker whose work can both satisfy lovers of art house and popular films, the film stars in the lead roles Julianne Moore, Marthe Keller, KiKi Layne and Kyle MacLachlan, impeccably dressed in Valentino garments, with a film score by the legendary Ryuichi Sakamoto.

In short, the film is about an Italian-American writer working on her autobiography and rethinking her life, who has to move back to Rome to take care of her mother. The structure of the film is complex, with a thin line between reality, flashbacks and fantasies.

Instead of occupying yourself with a minute understanding of the film's plot, I would rather advise the viewer to sit back for 35 minutes and enjoy the extreme visual refinement, in (among others) the camera work, dresses, and the picturesque Italian landscape, in combination with the spellbinding soundtrack. The last scene left me with a sheer feeling of joy and fulfilment.

User reviews are to harsh. The movie is beautiful and amusing even though its script isn't as good as its cinematography.