Saturno Contro: Ferzan Ozpetek’s stars are still not quite in alignment

Ferzan Ozpetek, the Turkish-Italian director of Hamam and Le fate ignorate (His Secret Life). has created another grand film that promises so much, only to inevitably fall just short. Saturno Contro (Saturn in Opposition) is an ensemble story of a group of friends who create their own sense of family in the absence of traditional relationships. They face a series of personal crises together and find their way forward through adversity realizing, (though they seem to already know) that without each other, they would never survive.

If this storyline seems to be everything and nothing at once, then you have hit upon the major weakness of this film. The cast is superb, with convincing performances put in by all these accomplished actors, and they have engaging personalities and quirks. But the jumble of interlacing lives leaves little room for a story to develop. Most of these people have been friends for many years, and their backstories continually intrude and dominate the proceedings. This imposes some very real problems of storytelling that the script is incapable of resolving. The film must take so much time filling in the past that the there is no time left for the future.

There are simply too many people on the set at any one time, and too many subplots. There are even two couples whose stories compete to be the central focus of the proceedings: Lorenzo and Davide, the gay couple and their straight friends, Antonio and Angelica. All four actors (Luca Argentero, Pierfrancesco Favino, Stefano Accorsi, and Margherita Buy, respectively) are excellent and ultimately wasted in a story that does not go very far. But at least they get to center stage. Other fine performances by Ambra Angiolini and Ennio Fantastichini are thrown away in roles that are simply screaming for development.

Certainly the problem is not with the filmmaking. Ozpetek is an accomplished director who manages to make this rather pretentious story thoroughly enchanting. The exteriors are sweepingly grand, the close-ups peculiarly revealing; especially with the extravagantly handsome Luca Argentero and the hauntingly needy "other woman," played by Isabella Ferrari. And there is one scene that is so ingenious it could be considered a lesson in filmmaking. While the ensemble of friends sit about in a public space, gloomily contemplating the future, a stranger, a woman talking on her cell phone, comes into earshot. She is speaking in a foreign tongue and her voice is at first a minor disturbance that the characters and the spectators try to ignore. But gradually, we can tell from the tone of her voice that she is describing some disaster over the wires, and finally, her sobbing, nearly hysterical voice completely dominates the scene, sending the characters off to face their crisis. In this way, this unknown woman becomes the personification and the expression of all their grief and anguish. It is stunningly effective.

There seems to be a desire to say too much with this one film, like someone who is trying to hold far too many tennis balls in their arms: inevitably there will be several tennis balls bouncing away on the floor, and that is what will draw our attention. All of the missed opportunities are like films waiting to happen, and Saturno Contro unfortunately ends up feeling like the pilot for a television mini-series.