VALENCIA. Giulio (Lorenzo Aloi) lives a peaceful existence in the countryside with his parents. It’s summer and she takes care of the garden with care while the family eats cucumber and tomato salads from the garden. He doesn’t have too many worries despite her youth until Lia (Irene Vetere) appears, who returns to her parents’ home, to the adjacent house, after it has been uninhabited for many years. They probably played together when they were little, but they don’t remember. Lia appears and the small world that Giulio inhabited will be turned upside down. He will see her in the distance and her next meeting will be at the lake, where she follows him, naked and inviting him to kiss her sex. Lia has a wild and untamable look. She is a real unknown to Giulio, and together with her he will dare to do things that scare him, like walking backwards along a cliff or driving down inhospitable paths with the lights off. But the germ of desire has settled there and there is no turning back.
What is Lia hiding? Why is she so hermetic? La tana is the debut feature by the Italian Beatrice Baldacci and was developed within the program of the Biennale College Cinema, premiering at the last edition of the Venice Film Festival. It stems from a previous autobiographical short film in which the director used home recordings to recall her childhood and her relationship with her mother, who suffered from a degenerative mental process. The identification between the author herself and the character of Lia is clear: both fight to keep alive a memory that is not even their own but that, through cinema, can be symbolized and reproduced.
In La tana (which means ‘the lair’, where Lia hides from the madding crowd), nature surrounds everything, it is Lia’s refuge, but also her condemnation, because she knows that she will no longer be able to capture that beauty for her withered mother. Meanwhile, she will be consumed. That is why at first she will use Giulio as a catharsis, she will play with him, she will introduce him to an unhealthy and toxic sexual game that neither of them will be too aware of.
Beatrice Baldacci plays with mystery, with atmospheres, with the suspended and tense environment, with eroticism and death. Lia does not want to share her fears with anyone, she prefers to take an almost self-destructive path in the face of pain, illness and loss that invade her. At first, the narration takes on Giulio’s point of view, but everything becomes more interesting from the moment Lia ceases to be an enigma and takes charge of the story.
It is truly revealing how the director juxtaposes the exuberance of wild nature with the presence of death, as well as, at the same time, taking on fundamental importance that totemic and disturbing hypnotic actress that is Irene Vetere (who has already proved to be the center of attention in the wonderful Magical nights, by Paolo Virzì). Thus, paradise is contrasted with hell, delicacy with rot, light with darkness, the happiness of the past with the pain of the present, freedom with repression.
Beatrice Baldacci, with a single film, deeply personal and minimalist, consolidates herself as a narrator with her own style, interested in the personal story, but also in the cinematographic, extremely sensory and telluric, appealing to the essence and the roots, to the defenseless bodies, to the need of escape.
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