La Sapienza

This stylized philosophical romance ponders European cultural treasures with the unencumbered awe that only an American expat can muster. The director, Eugène Green, a native New Yorker who has been living in France since the nineteen-sixties, focusses on a Parisian couple, Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione), a rationalistic architect with mystical yearnings, and Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman), a sociologist with spiritual inclinations, who head for Italy so that Alexandre can complete his studies of the baroque architect Borromini. There, they encounter another couple, of sorts—Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), a frail young student, and her brother, Goffredo (Ludovico Succio), a teen-age architect-in-training to whom she’s overly attached. Aliénor, detecting crisscrossed affinities, dispatches Goffredo to Rome with Alexandre so that she can stay with Lavinia in the lakeside splendor of Stresa. Green conjures vast ideas from this intimate story, filming architectural wonders with analytical ardor and revealing the architects’ discovery of the importance of light in design. Green’s richly textured, painterly images fuse with the story to evoke the essence of humane urbanity and the relationships that it fosters, whether educational, familial, or erotic. In Italian and French.