‘My Birthday’: Venice Review

Dir: Christian Filippi. Italy. 2024. 91mins

Comforting fantasy confronts cold reality in My Birthday, the debut feature from Christian Filippi which follows an angry teenager who pins all his hopes for the future on a reunion with his unreliable mother. This seems destined not to end well, but Filippi invests familiar material with energy and raw emotion whilst also showcasing a fierce central performance from newcomer Zackari Delmas. A compact, approachable first feature shows the kind of promise that might propel it beyond its screening as part of the Biennale College Cinema section at Venice. 

A fierce central performance from newcomer Zackari Delmas

Inspired by the experiences of people Filippi met in workshops at foster homes in Rome, My Birthday is dedicated to all those who are looking for their place in the world. It opens at boiling point, with distraught teenager Riccardino (Delmas) perched on a rooftop ledge and threatening to jump. Fellow residents of his foster home either scoff or shout encouragement. Care worker Simona (Giulia Galassi) is able to talk him down, and clearly has a soft spot for an ungovernable boy who is now days away from his 18th birthday. 

Petulant, misunderstood and permanently angry with the world, Riccardino has a long line of antecedents that stretches from James Dean to Xavier Dolan. Delmas softens him enough to leave a sympathetic sheen on all his explosive outbursts and sense of injustice. This is a teenager who can go from zero to sixty at the slightest provocation. Filippi paints him very much as a caged animal with repeated shots of him placed against a brick wall, staring out at the world through a wire fence (shades of Brando in 1954’s On The Waterfront), or shoulders hunched and squeezed into a corner. He has spent four years in the foster home but, to him, this safety net remains a prison. All he wants is to restart his life with the mother he has seen only a handful of times during that period.

Filippi’s storytelling has its roots in Italian Neo-realism and the films of Ken Loach as he focuses on the life of someone consigned to the margins of society. Handheld camerawork and extreme closeups mean that Riccardino is literally in your face as his future hangs in the balance. Filippi and co-writer Anita Otto find ways to humanise him and make him distinctive, including his ambition to become a bartender and skilled cocktail maker. There are lighter touches in a rare friendship Riccardino has forged with another boy in the foster home, and in the understanding champion he has found in Simona. There are also two parallel and affecting sequences in which Riccardino dances exuberantly to a burst of music first with Simona, who is like a mother to him, and then with his real mother Antonella (Silvia D’Amico).

Riccardino’s decision to break free and find his mother steers the film into fugitive road movie territory marked by disappointments and revelations. In her scenes, D’Amico captures the vulnerability and complexity of Antonella, an unpredictable free spirit, sentimental about her son but only too aware that she is not capable of giving him the secure family life he craves.

There is a suggestion that Antonella may be a figment of Riccardino’s imagination: we only hear Riccardino’s side of the conversation when he talks to her on the phone and it is never entirely clear how he manages to liberate her from the clinic where she is being treated. Yet, despite some vagueness in the plotting, My Birthday retains its emotional grip as Riccardino faces his big birthday and what adulthood might require of him.