Review of the film “The Long-awaited Dawn” by Saverio Costanzo

Saverio Costanzo’s film “The Long-awaited Dawn” was released, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2023. In a costume production with the participation of American actors, the Italian director tried to pay tribute to the glorious past of the Cinecittà film studio and at the same time talk about how a timid, naive girl becomes a strong woman, but his good intentions were lost in the retro scenery, he believes Julia Shagelman.

The Cinecittà studio in a nearby Roman suburb was opened in 1937 by Benito Mussolini with the aim of reviving national cinema. During the Second World War, salon comedies, melodramas and patriotic films about the glorious past and bright future of great Italy were filmed here. In 1945, the studio turned into a refugee camp, but in the 1950s, centurions, gladiators and other kings and pharaohs returned here again. American filmmakers were attracted by the cheapness of labor and the abundance of sunny days, so it was here that films such as Camo Cometh (1951) with Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor, Ben-Hur (1958) with Charlton Heston, and Cleopatra ( 1963) with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) with Sophia Loren and Alec Guinness, and many pictures from modern life – for example, Roman Holiday (1953). “Cinecitta” began to be called “Hollywood on the Tiber”, and crowds of locals besieged it to get into the crowd.

It is precisely this delightful opportunity to act in a movie that is offered to the beautiful Iris (Sophie Panizzi) by a slippery-looking young man who spotted her in the cinema where she was watching a film with Alida Valli (Alba Rohrwacher). The strict mother (Carmen Pommella) does not immediately approve of this idea, but still agrees and even accompanies her daughter to the studio, and her younger sister, the shy Mimosa (Rebecca Antonacci), goes with them. After a noisy confusion at the entrance, in which it turns out that their new acquaintance has somewhat exaggerated his influence, both girls are invited to audition. There, Iris agrees to bare her breasts in front of the producers and ends up as an extra in the historical epic about the treacherous pharaoh. Shy Mimosa, who flatly refused to unbutton her jacket, is sent home, but she gets lost in the corridors of the studio, and there she is noticed by the lead actress Josephine Esperanto (Lily James).

Fulfilling the whim of the star, the confused girl is made up, changed clothes and placed in the frame, and after filming, she, along with Josephine, her partner on the screen and in life Sean Lockwood (Joe Keery) and the Italian art dealer Priori (Willem Dafoe) accompanying them, first end up on dinner, and then to a party in a rich house on the coast. Here Mimosa, whom Josephine decided to introduce to everyone as a Swedish poetess, will meet her idol – Alida Valli, as well as many suspicious and dangerous personalities, some of whom – for example, the Sicilian businessman Hugo Montagna (Giovanni Moschella) or the jazzman Piero Piccioni (Gabriel Falsetta) — there are real prototypes.

One of the sources of inspiration for Saverio Costanzo was a crime chronicle from 1953: the body of aspiring actress Vilma Montesi was found on a beach near Rome. The names of Montagna and Piccioni appeared in the investigation (the latter’s father, Deputy Prime Minister, even had to resign because of the scandal), but the causes of the girl’s death were never established, and the perpetrators remained unfound. This incident is mentioned in the film, but the detective-thriller line ends before it really begins, and why it was there at all, other than to show the author’s good knowledge of the era, is not very clear.

Neither this knowledge, nor the endless listing of names familiar only to historians of Italian cinema and secular society, helps Costanzo to create on the screen his own version of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. It is clear that the journey through a chaotic sinful night is borrowed from there, but it is shown through the eyes not of a cynical reporter, but of a pure, naive girl who must get rid of all her illusions and lose her virginity, both literally and metaphorically. It’s just that this is played out by all the actors, most of them with rather average talents and desperately modern appearance (except that Dafoe comes out on one texture), who are not helped at all by the thready script. You want to leave this unjustifiably prolonged party much earlier than the main character finally does.