Review: Abel Ferrara Reflects On A Life Gone By In ‘Tommaso’
I have admittedly never seen an Abel Ferrara film. Bad Lieutenant? No. Ms. 45? Nope. Driller Killer? Also no. King of New York? On the watchlist. Knowing nothing of the fabled director besides his propensity for controversial content like, according to Wikipedia, corrupt cops, explicit graphic violence, and rape via B-movie exploitation, I feel I have a better grasp on who Ferrara is as a person in the current present after seeing his latest film, Tommaso.
We enter with the titular character living out his late sixties living as an expat in Rome. Beginning preproduction on his latest film set in the Siberian wilderness, we see him navigate a domestic lifestyle with his twenty-nine-year-old wife, Nikki, and three-year-old daughter, Deedee. Gone are Tommaso’s wild 20s and 30s when he was an in-demand director, and in are AA meetings where he muses over past recklessness. Playdates in the park and domestic squabbles make up the lion share of his time, but underneath there is an aching pain that paints a meditative portrait of a man reckoning with a life gone by.
Focusing squarely on Tommaso played by long time Ferrara collaborator Willem Dafoe, the distraught creative is a loosely veiled stand-in for Ferrara himself. Throughout you’ll spot one to one translations of his personal effects that blur the line between facsimile and real life and give way to the idea that this character is an allegorical extension of Ferrara’s personal thoughts. Ferrara’s soon to be released film, Siberia, serves as a stand in for Tommaso’s own film. Both Nikki and Deedee are played by Ferrara’s real life partner and daughter, Cristina Chiriac and Anna Ferrera. And Ferrara himself has currently taken up residence in Rome to boot — nay two blocks from where Dafoe lives but that’s beside the point. The sixty-eight-year-old director says this film is semi-autobiographical — naturally embellishments are to be made in the narrative context — but you would be hard pressed to disassociate any sentiment the film presents as anything other than Ferrara’s.
Spliced in between Tommaso’s domesticity are moments of the surreal where Ferrera grants passage into deeper, more abstract thoughts. In these moments, the film meanders through personal conflict not easily explained with words, often contrasting the surreal with the tangible to reveal Tommaso’s/Ferrara’s remorseful past and fearful present. When and where these moments begin often source from seamless transitions where minutes going by before you realize the events on screen are manifestation of the mind’s eye, a dream that renders Ferrara’s concerns in the visual form.
Acts of lustful infidelity, death, and even some sacrificial Christ imagery are all in the mix. The culminating effect is a reckoning with life when there are few years left to live. Tommaso is the kind of reflexive work you might expect from a late stage director, where the themes grapple with objects in the rear view and how those objects influence the present, creating an internal crisis that ultimately comes to a head. It’s not always cheery — the film’s ending will ensure that — but when you hear Dafoe monologues at AA meetings outlying internal strifes to the tune of restrained emotional suffering, you get a better portrait of who Ferrara is and what he’s feeling in this moment, even if you’re unaware of his antics/films in the 80s and 90s.
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