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MAIRA’S FLUID WALTZ
05/09/2007
Shot in what director Salvatore Maira called a “flow of images, because the term ‘single sequence’ has something ugly about it,” Waltz (Valzer) is an impressive technical feat that follows a dramatic hour and a half in the lives of several workers and guests at a luxurious Turin hotel – and even more remarkably also includes several flashback sequences.
Upon being released from an Argentinean prison, a father (Maurizio Micheli) comes to search for his daughter Lucia (Marina Rocca) only to discover that for ten years it was her friend and co-worker Assunta (Valeria Solarino) who had been writing to him and that Lucia disappeared years ago. Meanwhile, on the hotel’s upper floors, wealthy football magnates ruthlessly plan the fates of club owners, players and championships – a year before the “Calciopoli” scandal broke out in Italy.
These personal, social and political intrigues all intersect to offer a not very flattering portrait of contemporary Italy through identities that are exchanged, sold and manipulated with frightening ease under the noses of a society rendered increasingly more numb by television. However, Maira says, “This is not a film against football but against the most hateful form of oppression ever invented by man: the silent, invisible suppression of creativity and expression by the media.”
The director says he had in mind a single sequence immediately, “because the film was musical from the start, and in creating a continuous flow I forced the characters to follow the rhythm of the camera, which allowed them to set into motion the backdrop rather than the other way around, where the story and actors are determined by regulating factors of time and space, such as editing.”
The actors were somewhat worried by this choice initially and Micheli tried to convince Maira – who was even told by a “digital wiz” that it could not be done – to make a more classical film because “whoever made a mistake, by placing their hand in the wrong part of the frame even, messed up an entire day’s work, yet for someone like me who comes from the theatre it was ultimately very satisfying to be able to follow my character’s arc from start to finish.”
La Solarino, who appears in the majority of scenes, echoed her co-star, saying that “once I worked out the difficult technical labyrinth of the shoot, the single take gave added value to the dramatic value of the film,” which presenter and renowned director Citto Maselli called magical for the absolute naturalness of its composition.
Natasha Senjanovic
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