Critics reviews

It wears its many influences on its sleeve, but offers little style of its own, and its own insights – into marriage, love, beauty, architecture – come across as so trite and simplistic that the suggestion that it's a parody of a certain type of arthouse film (which I heard from several bemused critics throughout the Festival) has stuck with me. If it is, it's not a particularly incisive or funny one.

In Green's films, it's hard not to marvel at his command of a very particular tone, how all the Brechtian devices that seem like they should push the viewer away instead foster an acutely intimate ambience, and how the actors' mannered performance style conveys (rather than obscures) real depths of emotion. Landman is a radiant comic presence with wide, absorbent eyes that seem unusually attune to the world around her.

A film of ideas—specifically, ideas about architecture and 17th-century culture—might sound like a dull academic exercise, but Green has too much of a personal take on the subject matter and too much of a sense of humor to make it come across that way.

La Sapienza" strikes this reviewer as easily the most astonishing and important movie to emerge from France in quite some time. While its style deserves to be called stunningly original and rapturously beautiful, the film is boldest in its artistic and philosophical implications, which pointedly go against many dominant trends of the last half-century.

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.

The fifth feature by writer-director Eugene Green, an American expatriate who's lived in France since the 1970s, is a characteristically eccentric comedy about urban planning and spiritual longing... This recalls Manoel de Oliveira and Eric Rohmer in its poker-faced style, deliberately archaic storytelling, and magisterial epiphanies.

The deliberately stilted acting of Fabrizio Rongone and Christelle Prot Landman as a discontented middle-class couple embarking on a trip to Italic parts from their home in Paris, combined with languorous views of lusciously filmed baroque European architecture, has the potential to make for a deadeningly mannered affair, but the film was significantly leavened by Green's taste for moments of fiendish humour.

It is only when La Sapienza verges on camp that it comes alive. Otherwise, it is a dull, ingratiating affair. It takes place in an imaginary Europe more likely to be found in Orlando than Paris, while its style seems to be patched together out of half-remembered tidbits from nearly every trend in the European art film. It was only when I put on the appropriate parody glasses – when I began to see the film as a spoof – that I started to enjoy it.

I've enjoyed some of Eugène Green's previous films, but La Sapienza left me cold... The melodramatic family backstories—an ailing marriage, a dead child, and a pair of over-fond siblings—certainly made La Sapienza feel like a soap opera written by a screenwriting team schooled in minimalist modernism. In theory, a potentially fascinating mismatch, but sadly not in this case.

Green's mise en scène makes the spaces feel alive, both with the history they've witnessed and as embodiments of the artist whose aesthetic decisions they harmoniously relay.

With its lengthy voice-over on Borromini versus his better known nemesis Bernini, the film recalls the Locarno 2012-premiering Museum Hours – though the latter might be more effective, Sapienza also examines the role of artistic tradition and its philosophies in modern life.Q

Most American studio pictures allot a separate shot for each character's line, and Green does much the same, but his pace never seems as rushed. I think it's partly because of the pauses between lines, which allow us to wait for more from the speaker, or to anticipate how the listener will react... The film harks back to a great tradition of disenchanted couples visiting alien places. And the actors, particularly Christelle Prot as the wife, have an intelligent vivacity.