The Staggering Girl

 

"Once the world was deliberate, and now there's randomness, and no one seems to mind." ~ Bruno (Kyle MacLachlan), The Staggering Girl (2019)

Julianne Moore won an Oscar for playing a middle-aged linguistics professor struggling with early-onset Alzheimer's in Still Alice (2014). A personal favorite of mine whose on-screen breakdowns are like emotional hurricanes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-A-L9LmQmU), Moore later starred in the puzzling, impressionistic short film The Staggering Girl by auteur director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name). In it, Moore plays Francesca, a blocked writer who returns to Italy to collect her blind, aged but still willful mother Sophia (Martha Keller) -- an artist of some renown -- and bring her back to New York.

The film runs a bit over 30 minutes and is a whirlygig of Francesca's fragmented memories of her childhood -- she's supposedly working on a memoir. The pieces are ghostly and elusive. And, on reflection, that's all probably intentional.

It is beautifully shot by Guadagnino's frequent cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Suspira, Call Me By Your Name) and contains many striking tableaux and portraits. All of the women are draped in Valentino's capacious gowns and cloaks because the film was created with the help of the designer's production director. Its stunning interiors and Italianate architecture lend the movie the feel of a fashion shoot.

The quote from Bruno about the world's abandonment of order was descriptive of Sophia's latest art work -- scrawls and slashes of paint on canvas -- but it also describes this picture -- a movie that is about sense and not substance.