L’Ordine Del Tempo (The Order of Time): Venice Film Review
L’Ordine Del Tempo, or The Order of Time, marks the first film in 21 years for 90-year-old Italian writer/director Liliana Cavani, who was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
The film tells the story of a group of old friends who gather at a seaside villa to celebrate Elsa’s (Claudia Gerini) 50th birthday. During the festivities, the group discovers that an asteroid has entered the solar system and is likely to be on a collision course with Earth. This drama explores what these friends do with what they believe are their last few hours.
The concept of this film, loosely based on the book of the same name by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, hooked me in. I thought it would explore existential questions like: What would you want to know if the world was about to end? And how would you spend your last few hours? But Cavani takes her story in a baffling direction and makes it a domestic melodrama! The impending apocalypse seems to give our characters a licence to declare their love for somebody who isn’t their spouse or say some really awful things to their partner. It flips between celebratory scenes and brutal confrontations so it feels tonally all over the place.
There are too many characters for them all to be covered adequately so some are massively underused. The central drama is between Enrico (Edoardo Leo) and Paola (Kseniya Rappoport), on-off lovers who never committed to a relationship despite loving each other very much. They haven’t seen each other for ages and the feelings come flooding back – but she’s married! That was a conflict I could get behind – but the rest of it didn’t interest me as much.
The Order of Time feels like a wasted opportunity and one of the weaker “asteroid causing extinction” movies. The premise was solid but the direction of the story was totally misguided.
Screening out of competition at the Venice Film Festival