Paternal Leave, the review of the film with Luca Marinelli

Paolo manages a kiosk on a beach in Romagna, we are out of season, there is nobody. Leo, 15 years old, comes from Germany, to know him and understand why he didn’t want to be his father. Paternal Leavefirst director of director of Alissa Jungtells the meeting between two strangers linked by the blood but separated by fifteen years of silence. And precisely in silence – in the looks, in the small gestures, in the hesitations – the film finds its strength, the emotions are measured in what is missing.

Jung – who writes, directs and entrusts the male role to her husband in real life, Luca Marinelli – He chooses a sober, precise, obstinate tone in not wanting to console. It is a cinema that shocks the melodrama and rather lives the cracks: it does not happen much, but a world opens inside every hesitation. Even the most symbolic elements – such as the flamingos that populate the beach, together poetic and fragile – find a discreet, evocative measure.

Marinelli is extraordinary in restoring emotional clumsiness, discomfort, fear of failing again. His Paolo is one who cannot speak, but who feels – in his clumsy and very human way – to be there. Juli Grabenhenrich, in the role of Leo, is vital, angular and fragile. Together they make up a lop, authentic, imperfect duet. Paternal Leave It is a small but sincere film, which dares to tell paternity not as a destiny, but as a conquest. And that reminds us – perhaps with some stumbling blocks but a lot of grace – that the fathers also have to grow.