Don't Move

Don't Move is the second feature from actor/director Sergio Castellito (Mostly Martha), who wrote the script with his wife, actress/author Margaret Mazzantini from her best-selling novel. Castellito stars as Timoteo, a successful surgeon and permissive father whose teenage daughter, Angela (Elena Perino), has just had a life-threatening motorbike accident. Sitting in the hospital, wondering if his daughter will survive, Timoteo thinks back to a fateful day 15 years earlier when his car broke down on a remote country road in the rain and a bedraggled young woman, Italia (Penélope Cruz), invited him into her ramshackle home only to have him force himself upon her. Timoteo then returned home to his lovely wife, Elsa (Claudia Gerini). But unable to get Italia out of his mind, Timoteo returned again and again to her sordid shack. They began to develop genuine feelings for each other. Elsa is reluctant to have children, despite Timoteo's wishes, so when he learns that Italia is pregnant, he has a critical decision to make about how he wants to live his life. Don't Move was shown at New York City's Walter Reade Theater in 2004 as part of a Sergio Castellito retrospective presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. — Josh Ralske

Review
Sergio Castellito's Don't Move is an aggravatingly overblown melodrama with a shallow, ugly, uninteresting brute for a main character. The successful novel on which the film is based, written by Castellito's wife and co-screenwriter, Margaret Mazzantini, takes the form of a first-person confession from Timoteo (Castellito) to his critically injured daughter, which may have lent his self-pitying account of his tragic affair with an impoverished street urchin, the bluntly named Italia (Penélope Cruz), a bit more pathos. Presented as a series of flashbacks inspired by a vision of Italia sitting outside the hospital in the rain, Don't Move inspires little sympathy for Timoteo's plight, and it's telling that the film presents both his mistress's woes (brought on by Timoteo) and his daughter's sad situation as conceivable punishment for Timoteo's transgressions. It would be one thing if it were solely the self-involved Timoteo who saw things in that way, but the filmmaker seems to empathize with this distorted view, offering its main character a perverse kind of redemption through the suffering of those he cares about. The film's style is encapsulated in the strenuously bombastic, overlong Italian power ballad that plays over the closing credits. Don't Move has received a lot of attention for Cruz's de-glamorized performance, her physical transformation into a poor, badly dressed, purportedly ugly woman. Cruz certainly works hard (she attains a certain aggressive lunatic fascination in the pivotal scene in which she dances spastically to a Terence Trent D'Arby song), but the seams show. Someday filmmakers will recognize that blackened teeth and bad makeup make beautiful actresses neither ugly nor brave. — Josh Ralske