Review: Hungry Hearts
Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher were awarded at this year's Venice Film Festival for their performances in Hungry Hearts. To say the prizes were well-deserved is an understatement. Both actors deliver superlative portrayals in writer-director Saverio Costanzo's initially gripping, but ultimately unsatisfactory psychological drama.
The film begins quirkily enough: Mina (Rohrwacher) and Jude (Driver) find themselves trapped in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant. She is a junior attache at the Italian Embassy in New York; she and her colleagues are having a night out. He is an engineer who is in the bathroom to relieve himself of his digestive problems. They talk, they laugh, she can barely breathe from the stench. Suffocation binds them together now, it will tear them apart later on.
Mina discovers she's pregnant. They celebrate their wedding to the jarringly incongruous sounds of "Flashdance... What a Feeling." Mina meets Jude's mother (Roberta Maxwell) for the first time. Though Jude tends to keep his mother out of his life, his mom assures Mina she is always welcome to visit even without Jude. "Better without him," she cackles. Mina, for her part, has been motherless since she was three; she and her father don't have much to say to one another. So we have Mina and Jude, isolated from everyone except each other, and a baby on the way.
The warning signs are there from the start. Mina is a vegan, already depriving her unborn child of essential nutrients. She obsesses over a fortune teller's prediction that she will have an "indigo baby" (a child from another dimension who will come to save the world) and purifies herself in order to protect the baby. Jude agrees when she insists on having a doctor who uses natural methods and alternative medicines. Jude relents when, after the baby is born, Mina bans cellphones and street shoes from the apartment to prevent the baby from being contaminated. Yet he knows something must be done when she refuses to have their baby's fever checked by a doctor.
Driver is nothing less than exceptional throughout the film, but he transcends himself in the scene where he sneaks the baby away to see the doctor. You can sense his conflict at having to betray his wife's trust to protect their baby, his shame as he answers the doctor's questions, trying to rationalise Mina's methods even as he knows she's starving their son. Later he will deliver the line "I don't understand how I'm going to feed my son dinner tonight" with heartbreaking simplicity. By this time, Jude has been finding excuses to take his son to a nearby church so he can secretly feed him some protein. Mina, who has been giving their son an oil to prevent him from absorbing the foods she believes to be poisonous, hovers over Jude one night and whispers, "My son threw up meat. What do you have to say about this?"
Costanzo elicits a remarkable measure of suspense from such seemingly ordinary moments. Dread and discomfort rule as the two find ways to go around one another. Costanzo keeps his camera close to the actors, all the better to capture every flicker of emotion. Rohrwacher's physical presence suggests Mina is slowly disappearing from our eyes, but there's a will of steel beneath that fragile exterior. One would be hardpressed to condone her actions, but Rohrwacher makes us see how Mina is operating from a place of love, from the maternal instinct of wanting to do the best for her child.
Hungry Hearts ends terribly, not just story-wise but, more damagingly, execution-wise. It's a profound disappointment because, up until the film's halfway point, Costanzo's film posits itself somewhere between a horror and a thriller, continuing in the vein tapped by Nicolas Roeg in Don't Look Now and particularly Roman Polanski in Rosemary's Baby. In fact, the apartment in which most of the movie takes place is but a couple of blocks away from the famed Dakota Building, where Rosemary's nightmares took hold.
Costanzo takes his surreal camera angles a bit too far, and he most certainly loses the plot in the last act where he allows melodrama to reign over common sense. Granted, the film had a tenuous grasp on logic to begin with, but Costanzo was able to disguise if with his confident technique. Despite that botched ending, Hungry Hearts makes for an engrossing and deeply unsettling watch thanks to the caliber of its two leads' work.
Hungry Hearts
Directed by: Saverio Costanzo
Written by: Saverio Costanzo; adapted from Marco Franzoso's novel Il Bambino Indaco
Starring: Adam Driver, Alba Rohrwacher, Roberta Maxwell, Jake Weber
