This is one of those films.
It is an Italian film about a Romanian woman, Eva, who, when the factory where she works closes down, abruptly leaves Romania, giving all her stuff to her neighbour, who is pretty unenthusiastic about it. She goes to Foggia in Italy, an area without much more to recommend it than Romania. When she arrives in Italy she imposes herself on a family who accept her, and she joins in the life of the family.
It is one of those films where one is always struggling to know what is going on. There are many abrupt cuts, often there are no establishing shots and the camera is often in too close to see enough to understand what we are seeing. For instance; suddenly we cut to a mouth eating a burger but we can't see enough to know whose mouth it is.
Eva often behaves strangely. For instance the first shot of her in Italy is of her trying to sleep in a station waiting room (I think). Then we cut to her handling the steering wheel of a car. Confusing, I thought she was traveling by train. Then a woman speaks to her through the window of the car "what are you doing here?". Eva explains she was sleeping. The woman says she needs to go to work, so Eva says she'll come with her! No apology. No apparent contrition. Bizarre. Generally the people in this film don't behave like human being I recongnize. They don't say enough, they don't explain themselves, they don't smile and they don't have warmth. They are cryptic and they leave me with the impression that their creator is trying to be clever in a not very clever way. I've read novels populated by people like this (the first half, anyway). I don't think making things difficult necessarily makes them profound.
There is a pivotal scene where Eva speaks to her mother and we learn, belatedly, a lot of Eva's back story.
The film has good cinematography, which is uniformly dark. It is a first film by director Massimo Coppola. It is not a bad film but the central character is not very appealing and it is hard work and not much fun.
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