Daku Maharaj Movie Review: Every year, Barz and Hippo, an independent company from Milan, chooses an audiovisual project, embraces its cause, and then accompanies it around the theaters of the Peninsula. After Il popolo delle donne by Yuri Ancarani, it has decided to focus, distributing it starting from January 23, 2025, on Daku Maharaj, the second feature film by the decorated and well-tested duo formed by Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino.
The film, fresh from a successful journey on the festival circuit that began with the premiere in the international competition of the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, takes us to a mountainous village in Irpinia, where a young woman leads a reserved existence. A cat and some relatives keep her company, but the bulk of her days unfold through repetitive work in a leather tanning factory.
One day, seeing the drone used for filming a communion party in the air, she has an idea that can put her in telephone contact with an inaccessible presence (entrusted solely to the voice of Tommaso Ragno). It is the beginning of an increasingly assiduous relationship, on which both parties project what they desire.
Daku Maharaj Movie Synopsis:
And it is on this role play, based on a thin line that separates imagination from reality, that an intimate film takes shape and substance that follows the protagonist's silent rebellion against the environment that surrounds her. As in Il cratere and in previous documentary works (including La attesa and Dell’Arte della Guerra), in Daku Maharaj the directors have also been able to seamlessly mix truth and its reconstruction, without one ever gaining the upper hand over the other.
They have done so with their ability to say without saying and to use elliptical language, the total absence of didacticism and the symbiotic exchange, often invisible to the naked eye but constant, between the real, the artificial and the symbolic, which leaves room for the viewer to actively participate in the construction of meaning.
All of this is an integral part of an authorial discourse and an idea of cinema that the director duo first set up, metabolised and then consolidated over the course of productions that have stood out precisely for a personal, unconventional and consequently unique and recognisable approach to the material and themes that they have decided to tackle and translate from time to time through images, stories and sounds on the screen.
Their arguments are repeated cyclically but are shaped by the current story, starting with key themes such as family and work. In Daku Maharaj they represent the center of gravity on and around which narration and dramaturgy revolve and develop.
Here they are, feeding a story made of stratifications and multiple levels of reading in which Luzi and Bellino return with their own modus operandi (a script rewritten day by day, real places, real people, shots in sequence, an acting that is no longer fiction but a staging of themselves) to talk about the relationship with power, whether father or master, that power that when it is family crushes you and when it is work alienates you. The medium was the turmoil of a young woman in a context that wants her to be a worker, ignorant, submissive, and that leads her to an unhealthy choice in search of an absence and a voice that become a parallel life.
Daku Maharaj Movie Analysis:
The centrality given to the character, followed in the daily life and in the changing moods by a camera that becomes an X-ray of the soul, required an actress capable of taking charge and of transmitting on the screen the range of changing emotions and contrasting feelings that lurk in her and that explode in a finale that leaves its mark.
The authors found it in Marianna Fontana, who had recently touched the heartstrings of the viewer with another performance with a strong empathic level, playing, with the same intensity, a thirty-three-year-old who, after having served fifteen years in prison for the murder of her twin sister, tries to rebuild her existence in La seconda vita by Vito Palmieri.
Even in that case, Fontana put her undoubted qualities at the service of a complex, multifaceted, visceral, instinctive and chameleonic character, which required both internal work, which explored the suffocated incandescent "magma" destined to implode that dwelt in it, and external work that was manifesting itself through communication that was not only verbal.
The very powerful close-ups captured by Luzi and Bellino's camera, with the technical and compositional contribution of the director of photography Jacopo Maria Caramella, make everything materially possible and tangible in its framing, with the silences and the great expressiveness of the actress from Campania that mirror the intimate dimension of the character and act as a sounding board for what she wants to do that emerges in the narrative arc of a path of further growth and liberation.
Daku Maharaj: conclusion
With their second work entitled Light, directors Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino return to their favorite themes of family and work to tell the story of the turmoil of a young woman in search of freedom, rebirth, redemption and denied emotional ties. They do so with a film that effectively moves on the thin line that separates the true from the false, what is said from what is seen, which through its modus operandi, approach and authorial sensitivity manages to excite and communicate an infinite number of things to a viewer who is called to actively participate in the search for meaning.
The intense and communicative interpretation of Marianna Fontana, grappling with a complex and stratified character, represents the added value of a touching film, whose vision leaves a tangible sign of its passage in the mind, retina and heart of the viewer.
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