Onde

In his début film, Fei sketches the inner world of experience of two handicapped young people. Their fears and insecurities, the result of physical limitations, become visible and audible in nightmares and ominous electronic sounds. The story of the budding love between the two is not told chronologically: dreams, memories and reality become jumbled up. In the city aquarium in Genua, Francesca meets the blind Luca for the first time. He loves the quiet of the world underwater, and she is visiting a girlfriend who works in the souvenir shop. Francesca becomes curious about the blind boy who finds it so easy to make his way through the busy city with cars racing past and a maze of alleyways. Very cautiously, the two seek out each other’s company. Francesca is however unable to believe that someone could love her, traumatised as she is by a huge red mark on her face. Luca is a musician and thinks that Francesca is only interested in him because he is blind. The pictures of the cold big city, occasionally from security cameras, provide the film with a modern, contemporary feel without becoming sterile. Onde is an honest and ingenious portrait about human frailties in a demanding world; a welcome change in Italian film production, which tends to focus all too often on the high-scoring ‘laugh and tear formula’. (SdH)