Hannah
(Italy/Belgium/France, 95 min.)
Dir. Andrea Pallaoro, Writ. Andrea Pallaoro, Orlando Tirado
Starring: Charlotte Rampling
Programme: Contemporary World Cinema (North American
Premiere)
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Courtesy of TIFF |
Charlotte Rampling gives a performance of devastating
subtlety in Hannah. This masterful turn,
which earned Ramping Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, shows the
veteran actress at the top of her game playing a woman whose life falls into a
tailspin when her husband goes to prison. It’s useful to consider Hannah as a European companion piece to
the American indie Who We Are Now
starring Julianne Nicholson as an ex-con struggling to shake her past, which
also played the festival. Both films are intimate character studies about the
unshakable stigma that crime places upon the individual. Sins of the past and
guilt by association are different crimes in each film, but both actresses give
powerfully introspective performances as women desperate to save their lives
from the burden of their crimes. Rampling, like Nicholson, gives one of the
best performances of the year in a hidden gem worth finding.
Cut to the next scene and the stillness of the dinner
becomes tragic. Hannah says goodbye to her husband while he goes away to
prison. The rest is silence as she wonders what to do with her life.
Without giving the audience Hannah’s backstory, the film
leaves it up to Rampling to create her character’s tragic history on her face.
It’s a task that Rampling relishes. Her quietly introspective performance
carries this film of sparse dialogue and action. Resigned to paying for her
husband’s crime with a life of isolation, Hannah spends her days and nights
alone. The weight of isolation becomes very powerful as Rampling sags and the
dejected Hannah becomes burdened by loneliness. Her acting classes are her only
salvation as she finds agency and power by sharing these few hours with fellow
creatives. The sessions are an outlet she needs when so many emotions and words
bottle themselves up home alone.
A shattering twist comes later when Hannah makes a rare
smile. It’s her grandson’s birthday and she bakes a cake especially for him.
Wrapped up nice in a fancy box, the cake travels with grandma across town to
the home of Hannah’s son—who lives far more comfortably than his mother, a
cleaning woman, and father, a crook, seem to—and finds her invitation declined.
Watch Rampling’s face crumble as the last glimmers of life leave Hannah in a
tragic vacuum. Whatever she or her husband did, she doesn’t deserve the price
she pays. Hannah is a devastating
character study that cripples us with the sad weight of loneliness.