‘An Endless Sunday’: Venice Review

Dir: Alain Parroni. Italy/Gemany/Ireland. 2023. 110mins

Three young adults from the wrong side of the tracks – and then some – drift aimlessly through a month of Sundays in this audacious if narratively thin Italian debut feature co-produced by Wim Wenders. There is panache aplenty in a film that turns provincial teen frustration into an existential moodboard, one that channels the YOLO energy of kids who see no tomorrow, just a never-ending today. Yet despite some ravishing sequences, in which music and sound design play a prominent part, An Endless Sunday never quite solves the problem of how to engage its audience from dawn to dusk with a compelling storyline.

The most stylistically original of all the Italian titles presented at the 2023 Venice festival

This remains, however, by quite a long chalk the most stylistically original of the Italian titles presented at the 2023 Venice festival, and it’s not difficult to see why arthouse buyers are circling (at the time of writing, France’s UFO Distribution had closed a deal) or why Toronto has programmed Parroni’s debut in its Discovery section. It has also won the Fipresci critic’s prize for Best First Feature across the selection at Venice. 

As in a modern-day Jules et Jim, Brenda (Federica Valentini), Alex (Enrico Bassetti) and Kevin (Zackari Delmas) seem inseparable. She’s a tough-vulnerable dreamer with a little-girl face, Alex is her big, tall, handsome, not too bright Romeo, while the elfish small-time thief and graffiti tagger Kevin buzzes around like a mischievous spirit. Following a black-screen voice-over intro that will be partly explained later on, Endless Sunday’s opening movement is a rapidly edited sequence that sees the trio joyriding in an open-top Fiat, spinning on a fairground swing ride, heading into Rome to celebrate Alex’s nineteenth birthday (where they observe a Papal mass from some off-limits high-up vantage point), and enjoying various other adventures, including a beachside interlude.

The trio have no apparent parents, siblings, or other close friends. They are staying – but perhaps not living – with Brenda’s grandma, a proletarian matriarch who dabbles in folk cures. Her apartment in a cheap low-rise apartment block which overlooks the rubbish-strewn countryside, a liminal space where sheep roam under pylons, and the local farm is run out of a trailer by an irascible German – played by an almost unrecognisable Lars Rudolph – who fences stolen cars when not selling eggs.

As Brenda discovers she’s pregnant, Kevin breaks his arm and gets a cast, Alex finds a job herding the urban shepherd’s scrawny flock, it dawns on us soon enough that we’re either watching scenes from a succession of summer Sundays or disenfranchised teen life as one long Sunday. Shiro Sagisu’s smoky retro jazz soundtrack and some off-kilter sound design take the action out of the here-and-now and drive home an existential strain that is driven home by scraps of dialogue along the lines of “We’ve been dead a lot longer than we’ve been alive”. If that sounds pretentious, it often is – but An Endless Sunday keeps redeeming itself by showing the beauty in the meteoric burn of these hormonal, self-destructive, romantic lost kids.

Like them, however, it can’t sustain the energy. A good 20  minutes too long, it gradually replaces good alternative storytelling with impressionistic dazzle and runs out of fuel – like the yellow convertible Fiat the three friends and lovers stir up dust in – well before an incoherent finale.