Mark Reviews Movies: TOMMASO

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 4, 2020

Writer/director Abel Ferrara's Tommaso is an increasingly unsettling dissection of a man's mind, as it's driven to the brink by anxiety, frustration, envy, and entitlement. It's an intimate and understanding film, and that's why it's so disturbing.

Ferrara's screenplay follows Tommaso (Willem Dafoe), an American expatriate living in Rome, as he goes through his routines. The man is a filmmaker, currently working on an ambitious and seemingly personal screenplay. One doesn't want to jump to conclusions, especially when the material is as raw and troubling as this, but still, one wonders how personal Ferrara's own screenplay is here.

One especially wonders given some more context. Tommaso's wife, played by Ferrara's wife Cristina Chiriac, is Russian and a few decades the protagonist's junior (as is a major character in Tommaso's screenplay, whom the protagonist literally worships at one point). They have a 3-year-old daughter (played by Anna Ferrara, the director and lead actress' daughter). Since her birth, Tommaso has noticed a rift between him and his wife.

Tommaso is many things—an unsatisfied husband, a worried but often absent father, a determined filmmaker, a recovering addict. That last role, clarified and given shape by regular support group meetings, is one significant key to the character.

He speaks of his old days, when cocaine and heroin were part of his routine. His new addiction, apparently, is to linger on his fears, his anger, and his desires—as well as, perhaps more importantly, to find some intellectual rationale for these feelings. There's a slow but seemingly unstoppable descent toward the film's penultimate scene of violence—or, possibly, what it's meant to symbolize.

Ferrara combines reality and some form of fantastical flight within this story. Tommaso imagines himself being brought before a police chief, and the resulting scene reflects the one between Jesus and Pontius Pilate (The final image similarly reflects a Biblical scene and the character's own sense of martyrdom). There are others spread throughout the story, such as Tommaso's various encounters with naked women and a vision of his daughter being hit by a car.

The trick to Tommaso is that Ferrara makes no stylistic distinction between dream and reality. They blend together. We're never fully certain if what we're seeing is actually happening. That's the film's wisest and most chilling insight into the character: These feelings are as real to him as anything else in the world.

Note: Tommaso is available on distributor Kino Lorber's virtual theatrical program Kino Marquee. You can rent the film for home viewing, with part of the cost going to your local independent theaters (e.g., the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago). For more information and to purchase access to the film, click here. Participating theaters are listed on the page.

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