PATERNAL LEAVE
Alissa Jung
Alissa Jung started out dubbing children's films in the early 1990s before becoming a familiar face on German television. She has made her directorial debut with Paternal Leave, a German-Italian co-production that has been selected as the November title by CinemaItaliaUK.
Fifteen year-old Leona Neumann (Juli Grabenhenrich) has a stormy relationship with her Berlin-based mother, Anna. So, when work forces her to break a promise, Leo hops a train to Italy to track down the father she has recently found in an online surfing video. Taking a bus to Marina Romea, a village on the Adriatic coast of the Emilia Romagna, she locates the beach shack and waits for Paolo Cubini (Luca Marinelli) to come home.
Struggling to communicate through a little English, Leo tries to interview Paolo using questions she has long been compiling in a notebook. He is uncomfortable and cooks her pasta and disbelieves her when she says she's on a cultural exchange with a local family. However, they are interrupted by a child's voice on a walkie-talkie and Leo wanders outside to see Paolo singing a lullaby to his toddler daughter, Emilia (Joy Falletti Cardillo), in a parked camper van. She dozes off on a deckchair and Paolo pulls it into the shack without waking her so he can spend the night in the van.
The next morning, Leo announces that she is going to stay to get to know him, although she gets jealous when she sees him giving Emilia a piggy back. She calls home, but can't tell her mother where she is and fibs about staying with a friend to buy her an extra night. Hitching a lift to the café in the centre from delivery boy, Edoardo (Arturo Gabbriellini), Leo ignores Paolo and Emilia as they have breakfast and she asks Edoardo lots of questions. He jokes that she's too nosy and spins her a yarn about gossips claiming that Paolo murdered his wife and child.
Wandering off with a flamingo swimming ring for Emilia, Leo accepts a life from Paolo, who gives her the chance to return his stolen wallet while searching for it in the van. He asks how much Anna had told Leo about him and reveals that they had got together on a summer job. Stopping to look at some flamingos on the Po Delta, Leo explains that the birds make excellent fathers. She shows Paolo some photos from her childhood and is wounded when he admits to having taken a paternity test after she was born. He hadn't seen her since, but denies that he simply ran away from his responsibility, as things were complicated and time had passed.
When they drive to a builders' yard to collect tiles to repair his roof, Paolo pointedly doesn't introduce Leo to his ex-brother-in-law and she is hurt than he has never told his family or friends about her. Nevertheless, she agrees to go for a surfing lesson (even though it's off-season and the sea is grey and cold) and Leo feels pleased with herself when she manages to stand upright on her board. As they dry off in the camper, she asks about the tattoos on his arm and he shows her the one on his chest that he had done the year she was born.
He promises that they can camp for the night before she catches the train home and they stand together on the beach. However, he is spooked when she rests her head on his shoulder and he makes the excuse that they have to go home because he has forgotten to give Emilia the toy tiger she needs for bedtime. Leo is unimpressed by his claim that he is trying to avoid repeating past mistakes and strides off with the flamingo ring. Sitting on the bench outside the café, she decides against telling Anna she's in Italy when sending a voicemail. But she is relieved when Edoardo finds her and walks her to the beach, where they shelter in the cab of the digger his father drives in the dunes. Disgusted by the porn mag he finds under the seat, Edoardo starts a fire and tears out pages to keep it going. Leo contributes by tossing on the notebook containing her questions for Paolo.
He is back at the shack and calls Anna's number (which Leo had chalked on a blackboard), but she doesn't pick up. After Edoardo goes home, Leo phones Paolo, but opts not to speak when he picks up and she spends the night in the cab after the flamingo ring deflates loudly in the darkness. Waking up at dawn, Leo sees the light on the sea and is pleased when Edoardo shows up. He is sporting a black eye because his father has beaten him in an effort to `protect' him from being gay. Leo tells him to be who he wants to be, but poses for a selfie for Edoardo to show his father his German girlfriend.
Drying off after a swim, Leo finds Paolo waiting for her by the digger. He is angry that she ran away and has now missed her train. But he is even more indignant when Leo insists on introducing herself to Emilia and her mother, Valeria (Gaia Rinaldi), who is very protective towards the stranger and insists on her having a croissant before taking a shower to warm up. Paolo stands outside and tells Leo that he is glad she came, but hopes she can understand that the time isn't right for grand revelations. However, she feels let down and turns up the water to drown out his voice.
When she emerges, Leo finds Emilia waiting for her, as she doesn't want her to go. She runs into the woods and Leo follows, leaving Paolo and Valeria to search for their missing daughter with growing panic. Thinking that Leo had taken Emilia to get back at him, Paolo slaps her face and she runs away, as Valeria demands a full explanation. Edoardo follows Leo to the beach and she gets cross with him when he says his dad has his cool moments. He tries to atone by improvising a song about terrible fathers, but Paolo arrives in the camper and they part with a hug and a promise to keep in touch.
Paolo suggests taking Leo to the police so that they can get her home. She tries to jump out of the moving van and he bellows at her for believing that she can just wander into his life and expect everything to go in her favour. They argue heatedly, but fall silent when they hit a flamingo in the road. Leo runs into the woods and Paolo follows her and they shout at each other in their own language until they cling together in a hug. Having buried the flamingo, Paolo offers to drive Leo home. But she takes the train and leaves her mother a message that she'll be back soon.
Whether Leo gets round to telling Anna where she's been or whether Paolo comes clean to Valeria is left unclear. One suspects they'll stay in touch, but it's not easy to see how the pair can build a relationship over such a great distance. But the fact that the audience is left pondering these matters proves that Alissa Jung has succeeded in making us care about a couple of characters whose flaws initially make them rather resistible. Credit should also go, of course, to newcomer Juli Grabenhenrich and the ever-watchable Luca Marinelli (who is Jung's off-screen partner), as each resists cheap emotionalism in retaining a naturalism that carries over into the way Jung tells and paces her story.
She's much indebted to Austrian cinematographer Carolina Steinbrecher, who not only captures the chilly austerity of the winter scenery, but who also helps shape Grabenhenrich's performance through her use of angular close-ups that compel the viewer to try and fathom what is going on in Leo's head, as she deals with her anger with her mother, her sense of betrayal (and curiosity) about her father, and her own fragile sense of self. The inclusion of Edoardo is crucial in this latter aspect, as he helps Leo realise that she's not the only one with problems and that there are worse fathers out there than Paolo.
Following Jean Renoir's maxim about everyone having their reasons, Jung avoids making Paolo either callously self-absorbed or glibly empathetic. While he responded to Anna's pregnancy with chauvinistic panic, he spent a decade feeling guilty about his actions and only embarked upon another relationship when he met Valeria. Here again, he messed up and took himself to Morocco to teach surfing (with the video that Leo found showing him claiming to be a father figure to the kids in his class) before he plucked up the courage to return and attempt to be a parent.
There are echoes of Charlotte Regan's Scrapper (2023) in the way Leo sets out to make her father confront his actions. But Jung's screenplay isn't as pugnaciously witty or relentlessly gritty. Instead, it settles into the ambience of the Adriatic coastline and the region's salt marshes, although the business with the flamingos is a bit corny.