I really wish I liked this as much as others, because it has its virtues. It’s charming, pleasant to look at, has an energy. Tender. O’Connor has it – sexy without trying too hard, stoic but not without a twinkle in his eye. It’s interesting he’s played grimy scamps in both of his breakouts this year – I compared him to Belmondo after he played that role in Challengers’ reformulation of A Woman is a Woman, and you could see him functioning as the damaged seeker in a neo-noir. He’s almost a midway point between Elliot Gould’s rumpled insouciance and Colin Farrel’s whiskey-breath romanticism.

I think at its best it’s exploring the intersection of capitalism and art, or even functioning as a metaphor for filmmaking itself – a self-sustaining group of weirdos sifting through trash to find beauty, doing it “for the money” but really for the game, getting confused between the two. Trying to realize our longing and mourning through expeditions into art and commerce, “not caring” about the former until it hits you like a ton of bricks. While its street-level ethnography brings to mind Italian neo-realist roots (Fellini is obvious, but even early Pasolini — though it could use the latter’s comfort with the profane to give it some kind of tension), I was often reminded of Altman in its stoned wiliness and the meta-textualism of tying communities to makeshift film collectives (perhaps that is where the Gould comparison comes from). But Altman edited with a joint in-hand, and it didn’t always serve him either – the truths a hazy slant show us can just as soon be diffuse, like someone unable to remember a dream in the middle of their telling. There’s a real lack of forcefulness concerning its themes, and in the film in general, which in itself doesn’t doom anything – a lack of plot doesn’t bother me, and it picks one up as it goes. It’s just that so much of the film’s psychic space, in lieu of its laid-back narrative, is paid towards a level of affectation and whimsy that I wasn’t quite as enraptured with as I felt I needed to be. It seems to take the gambit that its local color carries both a lot of its textuality and its charm, a bet with mixed blessings – I can’t help but feel if this were an American director, detailing an American environment, that it wouldn’t be a little more critiqued for something like, say, multiple song sequences recounting the narrative as myth. Or, good grief, changing up camera speed in a chase sequence — it’s not that such a thing can’t work, but it felt more like dress-up of new-wave anarchy and not a consistent vision of rebelliousness. The relationship between Italia and Arthur is similarly charming, mostly on the basis of the performances of both actors, while also a little too dependent on cute shorthand (it’s not like Chaplin-esque is an easy target to hit, despite its need to feel effortless).

There is some magic here, though – both the excavation scenes and dream-visions refuse the aggressive symbology of A24 wannabe-Lynchs, and are better for it. It’s not Sorrentino, for instance (although, again, at some point you need a little risk). That’s its greatest virtue – its humanism and sense of care for character and environment is so clearly not a “choice”, but as natural to the filmmaker as breathing. However much I found it overly-cute at times, it’s not touristic – Rohrwacher is from Tuscany, afterall. Films this airy, though, are so in the eye of the beholder – how often I felt I was told of magic, rather than experiencing it directly, is certainly hard to analyze. At the very least, I appreciated the authenticity – if it sold me its own charm too much, it didn’t sell me or overplay the natural likability of anti-authoritarian rascals trying to game a world passing them by. I’d have liked even more of this: of the ardent nature of beat-down bohemians trying to hold on to ancient beauty against the commercialization of art, of the dichotomy of creativity in a capitalist framework where you still need a bite to eat at the end of the day. It just feels like these things are only glanced at in between vibing. I think people are most responding here to the earnest respect toward old world mysticism in a world slowly erasing it from the popular consciousness; honestly, it’s a concept close to my heart. It was “there”, there enough for me to spell it out, but it distracts itself a bit too often – I’d say it feels true to the freedom of the film’s venue, but it also left me a little anchorless. Still, such a mix of geniality and anarchism can only push me so far away, even if the latter didn’t take the chances it needed to. I said if it were American it might be a little more critiqued, but honestly if this attitude were in an American film I’d be gushing; we need more rascals and tramps in our cinema, and I couldn’t help but enjoy hanging out with them here even as they refused to do anything particularly interesting.