Mi fanno male i capelli

That look! For audiences watching the radically changing – and charged – European cinema of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) was defined by Monica Vitti’s expression as she searched a barren Italian island for a missing friend. Their collaboration would reach its apotheosis with Il deserto rosso’s (1964) radical experiment in colour. Two years later, she was the titular hero in the comic strip adaptation Modesty Blaise. These films placed her alongside Seberg, Bardot, Moreau and Karina as a key figure of that era’s cinema. In Roberta Torre’s gleeful cine-homage, Alba Rohrwacher plays Monica, a woman who loses her memory and discovers a new lease of life through her passion for Vitti’s most memorable roles.

Mi fanno male i capelli is no biopic of the Italian screen icon. Instead, it is a paean to the cinema she helped create – a celebration of its transformative power and the indelible images that enchanted audiences. Shifting between colour and monochrome – and with it, reality and fantasy – Torre revels in cinematic illusion. She’s abetted by Rohrwacher, an actor who, like Vitti, exudes charisma, but who also possesses a chameleon-like ability that makes her shift between the two Monicas both a thrill and a delight.

– Ian Haydn Smith