Confidenza (2024), or “Trust” in English, is Daniele Luchetti’s much anticipated psychodrama thriller showing in the ST. ALi Italian Film Festival. “Confidenza” doesn’t exactly mean trust: the word’s meaning is twisted and changing much like the relationships between the film’s characters. It can mean to confide a secret, become intimate or familiar with someone, trust someone (dare confidenza a), or take liberties with someone (prendersi delle confidenze). The film traverses several relationships and the way they murkily overlap, through: marital, familial, and even taboo unions.
Confidenza traces the life of a now aged Pietro Vella (Elio Germano), a former teacher and writer on education reform. Having pioneered a method of teaching he calls “The Pedagogy of Affection”, Pietro is nominated by his daughter for an award presented by the President himself. To merit the award however, one of Pietro’s many students who have left his tutelage indebted to his affection must give a speech at the ceremony. His most special pupil, Teresa Quadraro (Federica Rossellini) is an MIT mathematics professor whose fame shadows Pietro, her former teacher and lover.
As a literature teacher at a high-school in suburban Rome, Pietro’s affection enamoured many but failed when it came to Teresa’s genius. She is clouded by a dark fascination for him. After graduating only to work in a shabby restaurant, Teresa makes her first confession to Pietro that she has always wanted him, starting a spiral of intense love and obsession.
After an argument, Teresa wants them to be perpetually bonded. To do this, they exchange secrets that are so shameful they’d ruin each other’s lives. Pietro’s secret turns him into a monster before Teresa’s eyes, and though she leaves, her game of emotional blackmail festers. Detached from the whirlwind of uncompromising passion and fire that is Teresa, Pietro settles into bourgeois normalcy. His wife Nadia, perfectly characterised by Vittoria Puccini, is mediocre and has cold feet at the altar. Nothing measures up to Teresa, who doggedly hounds Pietro.
Despite Pietro’s facade of success, his home is increasingly tormented with jealousy, unfaithfulness, and resentment. He can’t hide from Teresa behind his applauding audience, walking on a knife edge that she sharpens unrelentingly. Teresa’s wide smile and laugh become threatening and cacophonous, pushing Pietro to insanity.
Pietro’s vertigo culminates in cinematography that peers out of windows and terraces and balconies where outbursts of his screams interject his ‘perfect’ life. Teresa wielding Pietro’s secret turns the tables on his Pedagogy of Affection which once gave him the upper hand.
Thom Yorke of Radiohead soundtracks the film, marked by paranoid strings and electronic murmuring. Singing in ‘Four Ways In Time’ and ‘Knife Edge’, Thom Yorke’s soft vocals are like secretive whispers, that bring a humanity to the monster Pietro and the relentless spectre that is Teresa. The pair stumble through Turin’s claustrophobic streets alone, leaving so much desire and hatred unsaid. The characters age convincingly with make-up: it is important that Rossellini and Germano play Teresa and Pietro for the entire story; their performances are electric.
Each time the pair collide, in vastly different backdrops of their separate lives, they are brought together by an intimacy in mise-en-scene. They press close together in his apartment among stacks of books, and in a dark and glimmering restaurant: but there is always a balcony or window opening to a night sky that Pietro might fall into, consumed by shame. The tension between Teresa and Pietro is palpable when the Italian custom of kissing a friend ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ on both cheeks makes each encounter erotic and repressed sensations simultaneously.
Confidenza queries whether love and hate go hand in hand: whether the purest love of all is honesty, loving in spite of shameful secrets, and whether this love is incompatible with happiness. Duras calls it the ‘bipolarity’ of love, the sick way that love feeds off sadism and jealousy. In an interview in 1963, Duras claimed that every murder contained “an incommunicable secret” which women, like Confidenza’s Teresa, were especially acquainted with.
Murder or not in Confidenza (I won’t tell you what happens, only tell you to watch it), Daniele Luchetti foregrounds the destructiveness of infatuation on full display. Psychological thriller as a ‘genre’ I believe is overdone and riddled with rather superficial attempts at the sick and repulsive, i.e. Saltburn (2023). As far as the genre goes, however, Confidenza is a must-see.
