Open Roads Review: Quo Vadis, Baby?

Open Roads is an all-too-brief survey of new Italian cinema presented annually by New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center. Now in it sixth year, the series offers a wide selection of films, most of which will never see distribution in the US; this year's festival runs from May 31 until June 9, and further details (including ticket information) can be found on the Open Roads website.

Quo Vadis, Baby? opens promisingly enough, with a female photographer spying on a trysting couple in a hotel room from a lofty perch in what appears to be a skyscraper in mid-construction. The woman mutters angrily at the far-away couple to position themselves better for her lens, and complains to herself about the freezing weather. She is Giorgia (Angela Baraldi), a private investigator who appears to make her living entirely from tracking down and exposing cheating spouses, and has successfully made herself invulnerable to the feelings of her often broken-hearted clients. That evening, a box of tapes arrives at Giorgia's flat, sent by a friend of Ada (Claudia Zanella), her late sister who shocked everyone by committing suicide sixteen years earlier. The tapes are revealed to be video diaries kept by Ada during the final year of her life, a year she spent living in Rome, pursing her dream of being an actress; with the aid of strong liquor and hand-rolled cigarettes, Giorgia immerses herself in them, and in her sister's secret life.

Despite that tantalizing opening, however, the movie dissolves into a mass of stereotypes and missed opportunities. Its clumsy plotting and even more awkward characterizations are surprising and, coming from director Gabriele Salvatores -- the man who gave us the gracious, charming Mediterraneo -- deeply disappointing.

At first, Giorgia is an interesting, appealing character. Refreshingly unconcerned about her appearance, she nevertheless has a strikingly confident bearing that makes her impossible to ignore. Setting out to discover once and for all how her sister really died -- the Ada she sees on the tapes shows no signs of depression -- Giorgia dives head-first into her quest, calling in favors and asking questions with no regard for anything but the truth. In the hands of Salvatores and his co-writer Fabio Scamoni, though, she is quickly reduced to a sad, ugly duckling. As the girl who was always in the shadow of Ada, her gorgeous, dreamer sister, Giorgia is also assigned many of the stereotypical characteristics of the cinematic woman alone, including self-defense classes (in her case, it's boxing), a gay best friend, and an unapologetic dislike of men. And, to make matters worse, when she finally finds a man with whom she feels comfortable, the movie punishes her for her folly -- not once, but twice. Interestingly, the character of Giorgia is nearly rescued by Baraldi's dogged, bulldog-like performance. No matter the absurdity of Giorgia's lines or behavior, Baraldi refuses to give in, and manages to maintain the character's dignity in the face of what often appear to be insurmountable odds.

Because of Baraldi's unyielding strength, Giorgia fares much better than does her sister Ada. From the very first moment we see her on screen, the married Ada is a hateful, excruciatingly selfish person, constantly vamping for her own video camera (the tapes were sent, as confessional letters, to her friend Aldo), and obsessing over her appearance and her affair with a mysterious man known only as A. One gets the impression that she was meant to be the sort of magnetic, mysterious creature we find so often in movies; the woman to whom all men are inexorably drawn, and to whom women, too, want to be close. The problem, however, is that there's nothing at all appealing about her, and placing the death of such an intensely off-putting character at the center of what is supposed to be a thriller doesn't do much to encourage audience interest in the story.

In addition to the very slight mystery of Ada's death -- augmented by Giorgia's quest to discover A's true identity -- the movie also engages in a bit of pop psychology. By mixing Giorgia's childhood flashbacks with the tapes, and adding in a dash of difficult father-daughter relations, Salvator seems to think he's offering some sort of explanation for the characters of the two women. Unfortunately, all he really does is add a thematic schizophrenia to the list of his film's problems, thus making it even more of a mess.

In a lot of ways, Quo Vadis, Baby? (the title is taken from a line in Last Tango in Paris, frequently quoted in the movie) reminded me of Brasilia 18%, one of the few competition films at the Tribeca Film Festival that was almost universally disliked. The two movies, though they seem totally different on the surface, share a forced obsession with a character we neither know nor like, and are both deeply hampered by the need to force all of their female characters into neat boxes. And, despite their obvious potential, both films fail, broken from the inside by lazy, facile writing and a strange disrespect for their female characters.