Time is a relative construct stretched to the limits of elasticity by Saverio Constanzo with the period drama “Finally Dawn.” The bloated 140-minute runtime begins at a cinema in Rome in 1953 as three women watch the final scene of a saccharine war drama, the light of the big screen coming to reveal a mother and two daughters, one donning the beauty of a Hollywood starlet and the other the beauty of a traditional Italian woman, with big blue eyes framed by thick curly hair.
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The curly-haired girl is Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci), a shy 21-year-old used to inhabiting the uncomfortable but familiar shadow of her daintier sister, Iris (Sofia Panizzi). It doesn’t surprise her, then, when Iris is complimented on her beauty by a stranger outside the doors of the cinema. The man wants the dashing young woman to audition for a Hollywood production being shot at Cinecittà, the legendary film studio in Rome where Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, William Wyler, and many other cinema titans shot some of their greatest works. Big opportunities like this don’t come often to modest families like Mimosa’s, so off to the lot the trio goes, heads filled with bobby pins and dreams.
Alas, “Cinema Paradiso” this is not, and the movie factory quickly becomes a maze navigated quite differently by the two sisters. While Iris is chewed and spewed by the starlet-making machine, Mimosa becomes the unlikely damsel of this story, brought under the wing of Hollywood starlet Josephine Esperanto (Lily James) and her entourage of buffoonish American companions, which includes the lanky Joe Leery as heartthrob hopeful and Gen Z sensation Rachel Sennott who, as the walking embodiment of social media, sticks out like a sore thumb in this attempt at a period piece with her heavily Americanised draw and an edgy bob that makes her look like she’s the villain in a low-budget sci-fi joint.
In his director’s statement, Constanzo fittingly describes Mimosa as a “blank sheet” — although I suspect he meant it with much more generosity than he offers to his protagonist. The girl is portrayed as a starstruck Forest Gump, a gullible pushover who stumbles upon the rich and the famous as the mythology surrounding her quiet demeanor grows arms and legs. We know very little about Mimosa outside of her fascination with movie stars and aversion to the plump cop her parents betrothed her to, and we come to learn very little else by the time the half-baked heroine arrives at the grandiose settings of her comically indulgent finale.
It is of very little help to imagine what a film could have been when faced with the immutable reality of what it is, but it’s hard not to wonder what “Finally Dawn” would look like if kept to its Italian roots. Constanzo found inspiration in the murder of Wilma Montesi, whose lifeless body was washed ashore on a beach near Rome in 1953. The heavily sensationalized case kickstarted a media frenzy around the sins of the mighty in Rome’s lavish underbelly, a fruitful starting point for a cinematic investigation of what happens when a girl with her head in the clouds meets those whose roots are firmly entrenched in the bowels of transgression.
Instead, the Italian director chooses to enlist a series of shining American names to this multicultural affair, hanging his film by a thread on the fine line between European arthouse and American mainstream without ever committing to one side or the other. The result is a vertiginous, nondescript drama that resorts to Willem Dafoe’s soft-spoken gallerist Rufo Priori to act as a bridge between two cultures: an American man raised in Rome who translates between the manic Josephine and the meek Mimosa, softening or plumping their words as to bypass any sliver of tension. Dafoe, in all of its veteran talent, is misplaced but welcome, a healing balm to alleviate the sting of a cartoonish Lily James turn that aims for Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” but lands much closer to the titular characters in Nicolas Roeg’s “The Witches.”
As Rachel Sennott screams incoherent words while entering a vintage car, looking like she just stepped out of a fashion line’s TikTok ad, all sense of hope for “Finally Dawn” is long gone—over a hundred minutes long, to be precise. The bitter aftertaste of dullness remains in its place, an unforgivable sin within the art form Constanzo seems so set on paying tribute to. [D]
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