Last year’s The Sound of Freedom, championed by QAnon conspiracy theorists, grossed more than $250 million worldwide and made Mexican-born director Alejandro Monteverde, 2006’s bitterly sweet film She has been back in the spotlight for the first time in about 20 years since her debut film “Bella” won the People’s Choice Award. At TIFF. Monteverde, a filmmaker unashamedly committed to Christian conservatism,’s latest film is about Mother Frances Xavier, an Italian nun who rebelled against the Catholic Church and American institutions to help her fellow New Yorkers. It’s a frustratingly underwhelming biopic about Cabrini (Christiana Delanna). City in the late 1800s.
Cabrini’s entire past boils down to a childhood incident in which she nearly drowned. That she survived and continued to live long beyond her prognosis after her tuberculosis seems to prove her wrong to anyone who suggests that she does not belong to a male-dominated realm. Drive. After meeting with Pope Leo He ordered her to bring aid and hope to Italian immigrants. They live in inhumane conditions, facing widespread xenophobia and a lack of health services.
None of the young nuns who accompany Cabrini on her mission are written to show any individuality. There is no mention of how they feel about Cabrini and her actions or how they became her acolytes. Instead, Vittoria (Romana Maggiola Vergano), a young prostitute living in the Five Points slums, takes on the role of her apprentice, while the resolute Cabrini deals with Archbishop Corrigan (David Morse) and government officials. collide.
At a time when America’s hatred of immigrants targeted a different group than it does today, there is no denying that Mr. Cabrini’s commendable actions, including opening the hospital, impacted the lives of many poor people. But Monteverde and co-screenwriter Rod Barr have largely focused on a series of repetitive verbal confrontations, and despite the length of the project, they have been unable to fully understand this heroine’s humanity or even her relationship with God. Even neglects to construct a revealing portrait. What’s on screen provides little insight.
The constant look of regret on Delanna’s face shows how this religious woman was able to push through her physical weaknesses to continue working. In some scenes, we get a glimpse of the actress’s talent for expressing her dramatic intensity. Her reasonably believable performance, as well as that of most of the supporting characters, sets Cabrini apart from other faith-based productions whose cast’s over-the-top theatricality tends to dismiss them as bad propaganda. Still, Delanna’s performance suffers from having to drag on and on with her hallowed dialogue in scenes where Cabrini persuades wealthy men to support her cause.
That monotony extends to the film’s visual blandness. Almost every frame shot by cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreou is bathed in artificially blown sunlight streaming through every interior window, forcing an angelic feel to the story. There’s a fakeness to the patina, and given the ambition and scope of this dull period drama, it makes us overly aware of the limits of production value. However, this is not at all surprising, since the goal here is just mastery, not cinematic excellence. Message delivery takes priority. As long as the product looks complete enough to merit a theatrical release, artistic relevance is secondary.
It is as if Monteverde made this point by portraying himself and his work as an example of what a “good immigrant” can do when rejecting progressive ideals and aligning himself with fascism based on religious affinities. It seems as if they are aiming to appeal to the country’s fringe political class.
Given that former soap opera actor Eduardo Verastegui (Monteverde’s producer, friend, and sometime star) has become a voice for the far right in Mexican politics with his aggressive pro-life and anti-LGBT stance, the director’s Politics is inseparable from his film work. It doesn’t take much digging to find a video of Monteverde on American Christian TV claiming that the media is poisoning the minds of young people. He seems to think that what he and Verategui are doing is simply fighting Hollywood from within.
But their target audience, an audience that views it through a white supremacist, “anti-woke”, and definitely anti-immigrant lens, is not convinced that the film will appeal to Italian children of the same race and faith. Will you be willing to extend the same empathy you have? The children who arrived at the southern border fleeing poverty and violence, or the people who died in Gaza? i doubt it. Even The Sound of Freedom, which brought together the most extreme voices on the right, did not take a positive stance on immigration, despite portraying victims of child trafficking in Latin America. Ta.
As much as Cabrini envisioned an “empire of hope,” Monteverde and his collaborators dream of an empire of influence. But while the filmmaker’s intentions are questionable, the film’s greatest sin is its lifeless austerity and aesthetic dullness. Equidistant from shock value failures like the “God’s Not Dead” series and what is considered interesting filmmaking, “Cabrini” occupies a middle ground between mediocrity.
