Mi Fanno Male I Capelli

A little over an hour and a half into Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, Monica Vitti’s Giuliana visits Richard Harris’s Corrado Zeller at his hotel. “Mi fanno male i capelli” she says, her hair hurts, as do her eyes, her throat and her mouth. Roberta Torre’s Mi Fanno Male I Capelli (In the Mirror, a highlight in Cinecittà and Film at Lincoln Center’s 23rd edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema) with a score by Wong Kar Wai’s longtime composer Shigeru Umebayashi takes the sentence as a starting point to investigate time and the mind, memory and the fluidity of identity.

In a bravura performance Alba Rohrwacher interacts not only with her newly found guiding light of identification Monica Vitti, but also with the melancholy screen Marcello Mastroianni of 1961, the Alain Delon of L’Eclisse, Claudia Cardinale, and later Alberto Sordi from Stardust. Our memories as movie audience are triggered as well, when the layers blend and the fabulous clothes by Massimo Cantini Parrini (who also did the Opening Night selection, Edoardo De Angelis’s Comandante, starring Pierfrancesco Favino and is a Matteo Garrone favourite with Pinocchio, Tale Of Tales, and Dogman) resemble more and more those Vitti wore. Vitti’s costume test for Antonioni is brilliantly intercut with this film’s Monica (Rohrwacher) exchanging looks and garments with what she sees screened in the mirror.

When she returns from a walk on the beach she doesn’t recognise her husband Edoardo (Filippo Timi) until he puts her hands on his face. The body remembers what the mind cannot. A neurologist (Elio De Capitani) comments that “the brain forgets what it deems un-useful” and at a dinner party Monica’s senses are as acute as ever as she notices something in the air between her husband and one of the female guests. “Stop, he is not for you,” she orders, and already conjures up La Notte, the Antonioni film that serves as a kind of portal into this Monica’s melding with Vitti, the movie star.

Do we always have to be ourself to ourself? Why not nestle into a welcoming camelhair coat and whisper “I don’t know how to smoke” from time to time? Meanwhile Edoardo walks the tightrope between playing along with her fantasies and dealing with the money troubles they seem to be in. His shame is heightened when the official papers are served by someone from his past, his former concierge’s son. There is talk of an apartment in Rome that had to be sold. There is civil court and paying damages, while Monica has notes attached to objects that say 'pencil' and 'vase', 'lipstick' and 'book'.

The contrasting states of mind of the couple intertwine inventively, and Torre gives us enough space to reflect on both sides of the coin. Vitti herself was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease before she died at age 90 in 2022. The blurring of selfhood in this movie between Rohrwacher’s Monica and the Vittis from varying film clips also raises questions about age. Are we ever in our mind the age we are? And what does that even mean?

Alberto Sordi from her bedroom mirror invites Monica to be “host” and present his open house, a “great responsibility” that makes her feel useful again. Panic sets in when she doesn’t know when the event is to take place, and who the man is, next to her, asking that question. Picking out a sparkly blue dress, just like the one from Stardust, and guiding a little boy from the beach to meet the lion in the garden are all perfectly natural occurrences that can happen to all of us every night in our dreams and nightmares. Monica is diagnosed with Korsakoff Syndrome which, her doctor says, makes patients ”remember facts that really happened but in a distorted way.”

Composer Shigeru Umebayashi (2046, The Grandmaster, and Tom Ford’s A Single Man with Colin Firth) adds a gorgeous score to an astounding movie about cinema, memory, and the shaping of identity.

The North American premiere of In the Mirror (Mi Fanno Male I Capelli) will take place on Sunday, June 2 at 7:00pm - Walter Reade Theater.

The 23rd edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema runs from Thursday, May 30 through Friday, June 6.