This Poetic New Film Is a Surreal Adventure Through the Tuscan Landscape

Restaging Romeo & Juliet with stuffed monkeys; a mattress in a field with a toy donkey; an abandoned schoolhouse and an empty swimming pool. These scenes comprise the fantastic dreamscape of director Riccardo Vannuccini’s stylish, experimental feature film Things and Other Things. Starring his repeat collaborator, British actress and poet Greta Bellamacinaas Irene, opposite Vannuccini as Rocco, the film tracks two dreamers who make their way across a devastated, post-industrial Tuscan landscape, retooling its desolation into sites of play and imagination.

This sense of freedom is achieved largely through the dance-like quality of the film, which feels at times like a music video with its close attention to choreography, rhythm and motion. “Dance becomes its own language in the film,” says Bellamacina. “With the smallest of movement, the body seems to be able to bring to life the unsaid.” Known largely for his work in drama, Vannuccini is drawn to the hybrid techniques of performance pioneers like Pina Bausch, and often casts dancers in his pieces.

“My idea is that, whatever our culture or religion is, it is with this body that we are in the world and therefore this body can tell the story of our being in the world,” explains Vannuccini. For 20 years, his theatre company, ArteStudio, has worked in ‘therapy theatre’, bringing their practice into prisons, refugee camps and hospitals across Italy. Bellamacina prepared for the film by joining ArteStudio for a peace-themed play in Rome, which began at midnight and ended with a group dinner at 2am.

Vannuccini likewise draws on the multiculturalism of his company: in Things and Other Thingseach character speaks in their own language, be it English, Italian, Arabic, French or German. “Beyond language, we all live in our bodies, in our heads, in our hearts,” adds Bellamacina, who suggests the film elicits important questions about European-ness.

Things and Other Things is Vannuccini and Bellamacina’s second collaboration after 2023’s Commediain which they played the same characters trying to make a film from inside a mental hospital. Working together has become like second nature for the director and star. “I need strong participation from the actor,” says Vannuccini. “There is a script, but some scenes are improvised on the spot. It depends on the light of the day, how the actors walk, or how they look at the world this morning, with which gaze. In this sense, Greta is formidable: she knows the script perfectly but is always ready to do something different. This theme of being authentic, in the sense of being able to show that of ourselves we cannot see – the invisible part of our being – is one of the ideas that grounds my cinema.” This is evident through the ways in which Irene and Rocco embody spontaneity and curiosity on screen, eliciting in one another a comfortable liberty – at a gas station, Irene first absent-mindedly taps her hands against the roof of the car while Rocco is at the pump, but this soon blooms into a proper dance togetherwitnessed by a bewildered bystander.

“Riccardo had written to me to tell me the story, and sent me a script that was more like a book of dreams,” says Bellamacina. “He explained that the story did not have a logical linear narrative like a novel, but rather a narrative that is illogical like a poem, and for the first film, he wove my poetry into the script. The story is fragmented and layered, with no real explanation. I knew I wanted to make cinema that reflected this kind of poetic storytelling.”

Bellamacina cites a particular scene in which Irene and Rocco appear to be driving through the rain as exemplary of this quality: “As the scene continues and the camera pulls out, you see a previous character now with a watering can pouring water onto the windshield: it’s not rain, just a car wash and the car is going nowhere at all. There is a surrealist approach to it, and [Vannuccini] keeps you questioning your position.” Both make comparisons to Waiting for Godot and the art of Marcel Duchamp, but with its elliptical dialogue and surreal imagery, the film also alludes to the work of Tarkovsky and Fellini.

The uncanniness of the mise-en-scene and the performers’ playfulness within it is also evoked in the costuming. Bellamacina stands out in one scene in a fluorescent pink mini dress and matching platform boots against the muted apricots and beiges of an empty Tuscan streetscape. In another, Irene wanders a field in a custom cornflower blue gown trailed by a fluttering six-metre train. Both were designed by Pierpaolo Piccioli in one of his last projects for Valentino. “Because the atmosphere is so melancholic, the dresses take on a different meaning. They allow you to look at objects and costumes outside their context, like children often do when they play dress-up,” explains Bellamacina, who describes how the Valentino dress is made to look first like the sea, then the sails of a boat, before finally it’s revealed as a garment.

Far from signalling luxury or decadence, these sumptuous clothes instead invoke other ways of being, including those to be found in dreams, play and reinvention. Or as Vannuccini describes the essence of the film, it is “evidence of a different rhythm of existence, the time of waiting and reflection.”

Things and Other Things is out now.