‘The Time It Takes’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Francesca Comencini. Italy/France. 2024. 110mins

There’s a pleasing circularity about The Time it Takes. Francesca Comencini’s first film, Pianoforte, which screened at the 1984 Venice Film Festival, was an autobiographical drama that drew on her struggle with drug addiction in her late teen years. Now, after a long career as a director that has taken in fictional features, documentaries and TV series, Comencini is once more on the Lido with an autobiographical drama  – this time, based on her relationship with her father, popular post-war film director Luigi Comencini. Not only does The Time It Takes show a 23-year-old Francesca accepting the award for Pianoforte in Venice, it also touches on her father’s distaste for autobiographical movies.

Unlikely to appeal to audiences who have no familiarity with the director or her father

But this is no tricksy meta-cinematic exercise. At its heart, The Time it Takes is a sentimental drama about a father-daughter rapport, one that is saved from schmaltz largely by its palpable passion for cinema and grounded performances from Fabrizio Gifuni as Luigi and Romana Maggiora Vergano as Francesca. (Vergano’s breakout role came in the Italian box office sensation of 2023, Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow). Nevertheless, The Time It Takes seems unlikely to appeal to audiences who have no familiarity with either Francesca or Luigi, despite the script’s valiant attempts to draw universal messages from what was clearly an intense and complicated relationship.

Set between Rome and Paris, The Time It Takes will be released in Italy on 21 September by 01 Distribution, and in France by Pyramide in February 2025. Outside of those two core territories, its best prospects appears to be festivals platforms where it can be contextualised – perhaps even as part of a double bill with a Luigi Comencini classic. 

Luigi, who died in 2007, pretty much invented the commedia all’italiana genre with his 1953 classic Bread, Love And Dreams, and by the end of his career had around 40 movies to his name. But, refreshingly, The Time it Takes holds off from dutifully incorporating all the titles he was directing when Francesca was a kid. Instead, the first part of the film – in which a primary-school-aged Francesca is played by Anna Mangiocavallo, a first-time actress with a gift for naturalism – hinges mostly on Luigi’s hugely popular 1972 TV miniseries The Adventures of Pinocchio. Carlo Collodi’s classic children’s book becomes a leitmotiv that spills over into the rest of a film that is partly about the re-animation of a young woman with rock-bottom self-esteem by a stern but kind father figure.

Around a third of the way in, we leap forward in time to the late 1970s to discover Luigi and Francesca still living in the same bourgeois Roman apartment, but hardly talking. She’s now a sullen, clearly unhappy young woman near the end of high school, while he seems lost and embittered, unsettled by TV news reports about Red Brigade terrorist attacks and by the first signs of the Parkinson’s that would afflict him for the last 15 years of his life. It’s curious that we never see any sign of Francesca’s three older sisters or any trace of a mother figure (Luigi’s wife, Sicilian aristocrat Giulia Grifeo di Partanna, was the mother of all four girls, and outlived her husband by more than 10 years).

One of Francesca’s sisters, Cristina Comencini, is a fellow director, while another, veteran production designer Paola, has worked on films directed by her father and both her sisters – including this one. With its floor polished to a high sheen, the long, many-doored corridor of the apartment she helped her sister plan out here is used inventively to underline the growing distance between Luigi and the adolescent daughter he no longer understands – but it’s also the site of a cathartic rapprochement.

Warmly and empathetically shot by leading Italian DoP Luca Bigazzi, The Time it Takes also incorporates, especially in its elegiac third-act Parisian section, out-takes from some of the silent movies Luigi helped to save when he was a young film buff in 1930s Milan, which became part of the collection of the Cineteca di Milano. These silent divas and can-can dancers never entirely meld with the father-daughter story – which ends with a slightly clunky magical realist sequence – but they are still a delight to watch.