Michael Winterbottom’s latest film, Genova is a beautiful examination of grief. The film seizes its audience and takes them on an emotional ride around Genoa (Genova in Italian), highlighting a city as only an outsider can. Winterbottom lets you feel the wind brushing through your hair as his actors escape through tight alleyways on mopeds, or the sunshine in your eyes as they lay on picturesque beaches, in this slowly swelling story of loss and recovery.
Far from a romanticised or sentimentalised vision of death and family reconstruction, Genova has a more organic, realist approach to sorrow and pain. With an exquisite sinister undercurrent that simmers below the film’s surface, Winterbottom as writer/director has created a film that slowly unfolds with a possibility of danger ever present. The opening scene encapsulates the feel of the whole film, from mundane to highly tense.
click here to read my full review at Trespass
