Presented in the Piazza Grande section of the Locarno Festival, Laura Luchetti’s “La Bella estate” marks Deva Cassel’s first steps in front of the camera. A sensitive and elegant drama.
Summer is the season for first love and heartbreak. When Ginia, 16, looks at Amelia, it’s a cataclysm. Tall, beautiful, free, she represents an unattainable ideal that will, however, change her life.
In contact with this foreigner, the young seamstress abandons her tidy daily life to switch to a new world, that of artists, and thus discover more about herself.
With La Bella estate – The beautiful summer in French -, presented at the Locarno Festival, the Italian Laura Luchetti adapts the eponymous novel by Cesare Pavese. The filmmaker takes the viewer to Mussolini’s Italy, in Turin, in 1938.
With great elegance, the sets and costumes give substance to this drama whose delicacy, silences and care given to its main character manage to move.
In the guise of Ginia, Yile Yara Vianello signs a most convincing interpretation. She gives the reply to Deva Cassel, the daughter of Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, who is taking her first steps as an actress.
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Yile Yara Vianello (left) and Deva Cassel.
In the skin of Amelia, the actress plays a character at odds with Ginia. More assured, more seductive and more complex too. This role is a promising start for Deva Cassel as she monopolizes the screen from her first appearance.
With this restrained story, director Laura Luchetti never succumbs to pathos. She films the awakening of a heroine and a homosexual romance which, without ever going off the beaten track, seduces by its authenticity.
La Bella estate, soon in the cinema.