Lovecut (2020) by I. Estaňol and J. Lietha Review

This post is also available in: Italiano (Italian) Deutsch (German)

by Iliana Estaňol and Johanna Lietha

grade: 8

Halfway between the cinema of Catherine Breillat and that of Arnaud Desplechin, Lovecut feels very much the influence of French cinema but, at the same time, creates an entirely intimate and personal dimension in which, in a successful choral structure, there is a deep and never banal psychological analysis of each of the young protagonists.

The difficult age

Lovecut is, fundamentally, a film about incommunicability. Incommunicability between parents and children, as well as incommunicability between peers and incommunicability caused by the intrusive presence in our times of technology and social networks. And as one can well imagine, then, this interesting coming-of-age film by Iliana Estaňol and Johanna Lietha – the former Mexican, the latter Swiss – immediately turns out to be full of ideas. This feature film, made in 2020, should have been part of the selection of the Diagonale 2020, but, following the cancellation of the festival, it was included in the programme Diagonale 2020 – The Unfinished.

Facebook, Skype, Tinder rule in the everyday life of six young people living in the suburbs of Vienna. Anna and Jakob are in love and, for fun, start putting online some sex videos they have shot themselves. However, when they start earning money, things take off and the two aim to collect a certain amount of money, in order to be able to rent a room together and get away from their families, with whom they do not get along well. Alex is Jakob’s stepbrother and for some time now he has been in touch via Skype with Momo, with whom he gets along quite well. The boy, however, hesitates to meet her in person, because she doesn’t yet know that he is a paraplegic following a car accident. Similarly, Luka, Momo’s best friend, can’t feel at ease with Ben, whom she met on Tinder, as she doesn’t want to get romantically involved in order not to end up like her parents, who are constantly fighting.

And so, among trickery, lies and a great need for love passes the summer of the six young protagonists, each of whom is unable in any way to find common ground with those close to him, each of whom wants nothing more than to change his life and go far away.

If Jakob is increasingly unwilling to shoot sex-tapes, his girlfriend Anna ends up exploiting him and exploiting the situation only to get the money she needs to leave home. And if Momo is convinced that having sex for the first time is something to be achieved as soon as possible, Alex just needs someone who understands him. Luka, on the other hand, likes to tell Ben completely untrue things about her life and her past, also longing, like the boy, to finally live on her own, away from her problematic family.

Halfway between the cinema of Catherine Breillat and that of Arnaud Desplechin, Lovecut feels very much the influence of French cinema but, at the same time, creates an entirely intimate and personal dimension in which, in a successful choral structure, there is a deep and never banal psychological analysis of each of the young protagonists. None of them is perfect, none is unaffected by the difficult passage from childhood to adulthood. Likewise, each of them feels restless, constantly inadequate, as if it were always necessary to wear masks in order not to show the world their own nature. And the screen of a computer or a mobile phone can, in turn, be perfect masks.

And yet, in Lovecut , the eternal anxiety of the characters is contrasted by the extraordinary calm of the Viennese suburbs and of the Donauinsel, where warm summer afternoons along the banks of the Danube can, if only for a few hours, make one forget one’s inner troubles and induce young people, in some way, to show their nature, to be more real, more sincere. And it is precisely the extraordinary sensitivity of Iliana Estaňol and Johanna Lietha that allows us to fully understand the true essence of each of them, thanks to a mise-en-scène in which the two directors and screenwriters are close to the stories they want to tell, but also distant enough to be able to objectively consider the facts without wanting to judge in any way, but on the contrary, adopting an indulgent, benevolent and extremely affectionate attitude.