31/08/2023 - VENICE 2023: With the end of the world just around the corner in Liliana Cavani’s film, inconvenient secrets emerge that may not be, well, the end of the world

Claudia Gerini, Angelica Devi, Edoardo Leo, Fabrizio Rongione, Valentina Cervi, Richard Sammel, Alessandro Gassmann and Kseniya Rappoport in The Order of Time

A handsome cast of big-name European players are gathered in Liliana Cavani’s The Order of Time [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which has opened the out-of-competition section of the 80th Venice Film Festival. It’s the director’s first fiction feature since Ripley’s Game [+see also:
trailer
interview: Liliana Cavani and John Mal…
film profile] in 2002; she has spent the interim years being busy with a number of television projects covering Einstein, Francis of Assisi and various crime stories, as well as staging a handful of operatic productions. No mean feat for a filmmaker who has just turned 90 and has been active for eight decades. Rightfully, Cavani is being awarded a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s edition of Venice.

Co-written with Paolo Costella, Cavani’s new film shares traits with Paolo Genovese’s 2016 hit Perfect Strangers [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], also co-written by Costella. There, like here, a group of old friends, mainly urban professionals, have a get-together during which inconvenient secrets unfold – in Perfect Strangers via a game of text-message sharing, and this time with a possible end-of-the-world natural disaster just around the corner. Additional input (and the film’s title) is provided through Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s 2017 essay on the loop quantum theory of gravity, The Order of Time. We get to be flies on the walls of a beautiful seaside summer house, where lawyer Elsa (Claudia Gerini) and medical doctor Pietro (Alessandro Gassmann), with their student daughter Anna (Alida Baldari Calabria), invite their friends each year to celebrate Elsa’s birthday. The gang includes history teacher Paola (Kseniya Rappoport), economist Victor (Richard Sammel), psychoanalyst Jacob (Fabrizio Rongione), science teacher Greta (Valentina Cervi), journalist Jasmine (Angeliqa Devi) and physics researcher Giulia (Francesca Inaudi). A little late to the party is theoretical physicist Enrico (Edoardo Leo), somewhat reluctantly at that, as his mind is troubled by some big and small issues, including an unresolved romantic situation with one of the other guests as well as that end-of-the-world thing, courtesy of an interstellar asteroid approaching the Earth at great speed.

As the asteroid makes its merry way ahead, various reactions are set in motion down at the summer house. It turns out that Enrico isn’t the only one with unresolved issues, especially those involving betrayals of different shapes and sizes. Confessions and revelations are aired, followed by reflections, reactions, regrets, resignations and/or reconciliations. On the whole, these are cool and jaded people; Elsa in particular doesn’t seem to regard Pietro’s several flirtations and shenanigans as, well, the end of the world. Rather, everyone starts dancing to Leonard Cohen, singing “Dance Me to the End of Love” in a scene that may or may not be intended as deeply ironic. The best, and also probably the most “Cavanian”, moments are a few scenes between Giulia and a wonderful nun (a likewise wonderful Angela Molina) discussing existential essentials, presenting religion as pragmatism. As lovely as the summer house may be, and as cool as the people there and the actors portraying them are, this part forms a film of its own, albeit far too short and perhaps worth revisiting – perhaps in time for the next end of the world?

The Order of Time is an Italian-Belgian production staged by Indiana Production, Gapbusters, RAI Cinema and Vision Distribution (which is also in charge of its international sales).