The Missing Star (Screen Daily Review)

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The Missing Star (La Stella Che Non C’e)

Lee Marshall in Venice 12 September 2006

Dir: Gianni Amelio. It-Fr-Switz. 2006. 107mins.

Gianni Amelio treads water with The Missing Star, an anti-hero quest movie that has moments of emotional engagement but is marred by its genre fence-sitting and the muddiness of its final message. It’s one of those films whose fascination lies not so much in the drama, which is structured like a long shaggy-dog story, as in the setting this drama plays out against: contemporary China, filmed in a warts-and-all, near-documentary style. To get the most out of The Missing Star, it helps to think of it as a travelogue with attached story.

Amelio has arthouse leverage at home, and distributor 01 can bank on a respectable, though hardly delirious, theatrical run, followed by some pretty downbeat auxiliary revenue. Internationally (the film competed at Venice) Lakeshore International, which also sold Amelio’s last – the ice-cold weepie The Keys Of The House – should at least match the fairly modest territorial outreach of that title.

Leading Italian leading man Sergio Castellitto plays Vincenzo Buonavolontà, an asocial but Italian engineer with a strong ethical code that pushes him unwittingly into xenophobia. Buonavolontà (literally “goodwill”) works at a steel mill in Genoa which is being decommissioned. He doggedly goes on correcting the flaw he has identified in one of the blast furnaces, even though the machinery in question is being sold to a delegation from China.

The furnace is dismantled and shipped out before Vincenzo has come up with the valve which he believes will fix the problem – so he leaves for China, enlisting the help of reluctant interpreter Liu Hua (fresh-faced newcomer Tai Ling) to track down “his” blast furnace and avert a possibly devastating industrial accident.

So begins an odyssey through the New China, from the skyscrapers of Shanghai to the desolate wastes of Inner Mongolia. The furnace has been sold on by the company that bought it, and an increasingly sweaty and disoriented Vincenzo chases from lead to lead, based on the scraps of information that he and Liu manage to glean.

The slow thaw of the relationship between Liu and Vincenzo is reasonably well done, and the journey gradually takes on an allegorical character as the odd couple travel up the fogbound Yangtze river, visiting locations that seem updates of the topoi of the medieval quest: the Moloch-like steelworks of Wuhan; the Arcadian interlude of Liu’s village, Yinchuan; the apartment-block where they spend the night, a vertical city pulsating with raw life; the no-man’s-land truckstop where Vincenzo alights to see men digging a huge hole in the ground for no apparent reason.

This is all intriguing stuff, but it’s also uneven: Amelio never quite decides whether The Missing Star is supposed to be a docu-drama in the style of In This World or a Quixote-like allegory about a redundant man from a redundant culture with antiquated ethical codes – or maybe a cross-border romance, or maybe a road movie.

The shooting style reflects this schizophrenia: sometimes Luca Bigazzi’s photography is handheld, poorly-lit, near-Dogme, sometimes (especially in the village scenes) carefully framed and studio-lit. Even the quirky soundtrack has a Jekyll and Hyde nature, veering from classical clarinet strains to kitsch Chinese pop.

At the same time, though, Vincenzo’s character has a complexity that keeps us intrigued: he’s suspicious but loyal, stubborn to the point of childishness (he’s the sort of guy who says he not hungry, then asks for food when there isn’t any) but also capable of great kindness. This is one of those roles where the acting is better than the writing, with Castellitto, whose performances have grown in authority from Don’t Move on, lending a depth to the character which is not fully backed up by anything in the script. Newcomer Tai Ling is effective as an uncomplicated foil to Vincenzo’s needless self- torture.

In the end, though, it’s the glimpses of a China rarely seen even in local productions that makes The Missing Star worth a look. Recently, only Li Yang’s Hitchcockian coalmining thriller Blind Shaft has shown us the industrial underbelly of the Chinese economic miracle in such messy detail.

Production companies/backers
Cattleya
Rai Cinema
Babe
Carac Film
RTSI Televisione Svizzera
Achab Film

International sales
Lakeshore International

Executive producer
Mario Cotone

Producers
Riccardo Tozzi
Giovanni Stabilini
Marco Chimenz

Screenplay
Gianni Amelio
Umberto Contarello
inspired by the novel La Dismissione by Ermanno Rea

Cinematography
Luca Bigazzi

Production design
Attilio Viti

Editor
Simona Paggi

Music
Franco Piersanti

Main cast
Sergio Castellitto
Tai Ling