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| Paternal Leave director/screenwriter Alissa Jung with Anne-Katrin Titze on Luca Marinelli as Paolo: “Luca's performance gave me the opportunity to really dive in …” |
Alissa Jung’s perceptive and compelling Paternal Leave (a highlight of Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema) stars fantastic newcomer Juli Grabenhenrich and the wonderful Luca Marinelli (of Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden and Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty) with Arturo Gabbriellini (from Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are), Gaia Rinaldi, and Joy Falletti Cardillo. Other films not to be missed include the Opening Night selection, Francesca Comencini’s The Time It Takes (Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole) with Anna Mangiocavallo and Fabrizio Gifuni; Sara Fgaier’s Weightless (Sulla Terra Leggeri) with Andrea Renzi and Sara Serraiocco (Lamberto Sanfelice's Chlorine); Ferzan Özpetek’s Diamonds (Diamanti), a celebration of movie costume design, with Luisa Ranieri and Jasmine Trinca (Valeria Golino’s Honey), and Andrea Segre’s The Great Ambition (Berlinguer. La Grande Ambizione) with Elio Germano as Enrico Berlinguer.
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| Paolo (Luca Marinelli) with his daughter Leo (Juli Grabenhenrich) in Alissa Jung's Paternal Leave Photo: Alissa Jung |
Leo (Juli Grabenhenrich), a determined 15-year-old, journeys from her home in Germany to a coastal town in Northern Italy to look for her father, Paolo (Luca Marinelli), a surfing instructor who had been absent throughout her life. It is off-season, the clouds are gray, as is the sea. This is a region of flamingos. She finds him in a beach restaurant, shut down for the winter, and so begins a voyage towards each other, with both discovering until then unexamined aspects of themselves. Leo also gets to meet Edoardo (Arturo Gabbriellini) a local teen who routinely delivers breakfast for Paolo on his motorbike, and her little half sister Emilia (Joy Falletti Cardillo), whose mother Valeria (Gaia Rinaldi) is in the process of possibly giving Paolo another chance.
Well-chosen props (a visor, out-there sunglasses, a pink floating device), moments of slapstick and sharp-witted dialogue factor into this original mix and hint at possibilities of summers ahead.
From Rome, Alissa Jung joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Paternal Leave.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi Alissa!
Alissa Jung: Good to see you!
AKT: Are you in Italy or Germany?
AJ: I'm right now in Rome, because the movie had the cinema release here. So we are touring a bit. It’s in the cinemas right now.
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| Alissa Jung on set giving direction to Juli Grabenhenrich as Leo and Arturo Gabbriellini as Edoardo Photo: Alissa Jung |
AKT: How did the release go?
AJ: Good. I mean it's super exciting to meet the audience. It's so nice. We did a lot of Q&As right now, and it's always such a special moment when you enter the cinema, and the audience has just watched the movie. And there's so much love in the room somehow. It's really nice.
AKT: Deservedly so. It's a really beautiful film and very funny at times as well. How did it all begin? You also wrote the script, so what was the initial kernel that started the project?
AJ: I started writing six years ago. So it's a long time ago. I think my initial thought was that I wanted to explore the parent/children relationship a bit more, because it's a relationship we all know very well, because we are all children and daughters and sons. And some of us are parents as well, and it's a relationship which can be so deep and full of love. But it can be so hurtful as well, so I wanted to explore it a bit better.
And then, in my research for the theme, I talked to people who grew up without one of the parents, and it was something I couldn't understand. I mean, I can understand that you don't want to have the responsibility, but to not be curious to meet your own child, or at least spy, or be a fly on the wall to at least know something I couldn't understand. And that's how I started, more or less. My journey I started with Leo, with Leo to get to know this father who was not able to meet her.
This was a long journey in writing and exploring, and somehow it became more than just about father and daughter for me. It's maybe more or less now a movie about honesty with yourself. I think Paulo really has to learn to be honest with himself. He's running away from himself all the time, and he's stumbling and making mistakes and hurting people just because he's not able to watch himself in the mirror. We all maybe know this moment where we are doing something, and we don't want to know, and we pretend it didn't happen. And we go on. But we don't live with us anymore somehow.
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| Leo (Juli Grabenhenrich) carrying the pink flamingo flotation device she purchased Photo: Alissa Jung |
AKT: What's so interesting is that everyone has a trajectory in the film, and they are all different. Everybody is on a different journey, but they're in the same place. Even Eduardo, who is wonderful. The actor [Arturo Gabbriellini] is such a great find. I looked him up, he was in Luca Guadagnino's We Are Who We Are. Is that how you discovered him?
AJ: I've seen him in that, yes, and then the casting agent said that we could ask him because we were looking for young people of the region. Because I wanted to cast somebody who's really from the same region for the dialect and as well for a lot of things. When he came to the casting I was really happy because he brings this, I don't know, nonchalance.
AKT: Yes, I agree!
AJ: This directness, which is really beautiful. Yeah.
AKT: And they have almost screwball moments, the two of them, Leo and and Edoardo together. Your decision to have the mother be only a voice is also interesting. Was that clear to you from the start?
AJ: Yeah, that was clear for me from the start. Actually, in the beginning, I just wanted to have Paulo and Leo. And then I realised that it's maybe nice to have a bit more characters in the movie. But it was always about the relationship between father and daughter, and I didn't want to bring up the mom to make the whole family drama, romantic comedy mom and dad meet again story, which would put the focus on something else.
So I was quite sure that it is a short journey, that Leo has to be there for two or three days, because if not, the mother would know at a certain point. So I wanted the mother somehow be present in her daughter. It's interesting, because there are some people saying, Whoa! What a bad mother! She doesn't even know that her child is not there, and others are saying, well, she's a wonderful mother, because her daughter is so wonderful. So she has to be a wonderful mother.
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| Alissa Jung on the road with Luca Marinelli |
AKT: Leo is also very good at trickery. She's a trickster hero in a way, I get from your script, when for instance she writes a phone number on the blackboard. You trick us by thinking it's a different number. All of that is lovely. You spoke about looking in the mirror. There's a beautiful scene where the two daughters look at each other. It's almost like the Marx Brothers scene where they look at each other and do the same thing as if they were looking in the mirror.
AJ: Yeah, yeah, we always called it the mirror moment! Actually, yeah, that's right. Because I wanted to meet them without words and just being together. And so this scene gave me the opportunity to show that there's affection and there's interest, and there's something without barriers. It's just the two of them meeting. And yeah, actually, in the rehearsing process, we did a lot of the mirror game.
AKT: Of course we have to talk about Luca Marinelli. He's as good in your film as he was in Martin Eden!
AJ: Thank you.
AKT: I talked with Pietro Marcello about that film then. How much he changes in your film, and how much happens for this character is fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about him and his performance?
AJ: I'm super happy that he wanted to be part of this movie, that he wanted to be Paulo, because, having him as an actor gave me the opportunity to explore even more all the levels of this character, because I was quite sure that I didn't want to have a black and white character who was just bad, or just nice. So Luca's performance gave me the opportunity to really dive in, because he's just able to have this vibration and this, I don't know, this flickering from one to another.
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| Walt Disney's Fantasia |
And he has this courage to go where it can be really maybe hurtful, but then he changes all of a sudden to be super charming. And he brings all this so we were able to put all the layers, all the levels of this character somehow in the movie, which is super beautiful. And it's not easy. I'm very impressed because it's a really hard character, because he is an asshole, but he is lovable as well, and this not in a cartoonish way but in a really authentic way. It's really not so easy to play this character.
AKT: He could have become with a lesser actor, a cliché, the father who abandons, who doesn't want to know, but not he, not at all. There's so much going on. What about the flamingos? Did you see them in the neighbourhood and said, okay, come in! Or did you know you wanted flamingos?
AJ: No, actually, it's funny, because it was a coincidence that I went to Marina Romea, where we shot, and I had just the first phrase in my head for my story. I knew I want to tell the story of a daughter looking for the father confronting him with her existence. But I didn't have the story yet. And then I was in Marina Romea in the end of autumn, and it was all closed, and this atmosphere, this strange apocalyptic atmosphere.
So you could see there was life but it's not there anymore. And all of the sudden I could see the father barricading himself there, and this huge dune around his soul somehow, and I could see the daughter arriving like the ocean and destroying this dune wanting to come in. So I chose the place. And then I discovered that there are flamingos. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I did a little research on flamingos. And I learned that they are really these perfect 50/50 parents. So I was like, okay, I have to use them.
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| Alissa Jung on set with Gaia Rinaldi as Valeria and Luca Marinelli as Paolo Photo: Alissa Jung |
AKT: That was such a lovely surprise. I like the moment when Leo knows this fact because she did a presentation on flamingos!
AJ: The actress later told me, when we were already rehearsing, do you know, Alissa, I did a school presentation on flamingos in the third grade!
AKT: There you go! One more thing about flamingos! There's a beautiful Rilke poem Die Flamingos [Jardin des Plantes, Paris]. Do you know it? By Rainer Maria Rilke?
AJ: No!
AKT: It has a beautiful last line.
AJ: Oh, I'll look it up.
AKT: It ends with: “sie aber haben sich erstaunt gestreckt/und schreiten einzeln ins Imaginäre.” [but, astonished, they have stretched themselves/and stride off one by one into the imaginary]
AJ: Wow!
AKT: I want to talk about your actress for Leo [Juli Grabenhenrich.] How did you come upon her?
AJ: We did a casting all over Germany because we were quite sure that we had to find the right actress for this film, because without a lead which is strong enough to balance with Luca as well, it would have been really hard. And we found a lot of talent. I have to say there were a lot of young women, beautiful young women with a lot of talent. But I was looking for the specific energy. Somehow I really wanted to have a 15-year-old girl playing this role because I do think that the energy of a 15-year-old is quite different to a 20-year-old, even if for the production it would have been easier to find maybe an 18, 19-year-old young woman.
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| Open Roads New Italian Cinema 2025 |
I was quite specific about the age, and then Juli came along, and she never had done any acting before, not even a theatre play in school. She didn't know what acting is. She didn't even know that she had to learn the lines for the first audition. But there was something special about her, because she's so honest in everything she does, in real life and in acting. She does not say a word she's not believing in. And that was special. So I did a lot of callbacks with her, because really she had no experience to show, so she had to find out what acting is. But every time we met there was something more she discovered, and there was always this courage to go where it's unstable, where it's getting uncomfortable, where it's getting a bit wobbly somehow. So a lot of actors just go there where it's comfortable, and that's a bit annoying.
And she brought this courage to go where she really didn't know what she would expect there. So yeah, she convinced me, with these two qualities, her honesty and her courage. And I mean, these are the most important qualities for actors. So I was like, okay, the rest we will figure out, she has the two elements which are important, and she's super intelligent and just a really smart woman.
AKT: It works really well, the two together. Is sneezing from chocolate actually quite common?
AJ: Ha! It is not quite common, but actually I didn't make it up. A friend of my daughter, she's sneezing with chocolate. And then all of a sudden my brother's girlfriend, she sneezed because of chocolate. And I was like, oh, so this is actually existing. It's not common, but it's existing.
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| Paternal Leave poster |
AKT: And another silly question, what is “no more buckets like Merlin's cottage” referring to?
AJ: This is actually the only line I didn't write. It's the only improvised Luca line. I think it's a Disney movie where he needs buckets because the water is coming in. He's referring to the magician Merlin.
AKT: It could be Disney’s Fantasia, I have a vague memory of it. Thank you very much for this! How long are you going to stay in New York?
AJ: Unfortunately just three days, but I'm really looking forward because it's so nice that an English speaking audience can watch the movie. Till now, we had Italians, Portuguese, Spanish, German people. So I'm really looking forward.
AKT: They'll love it, I'm sure, in New York. See you next week!
AJ: Thank you so much. See you then!
The North American première Paternal Leave is on Saturday, May 31 at 6:00pm followed by a Q&A with Alissa Jung - Walter Reade Theater.
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema runs from Thursday, May 29 through Thursday, June 5.
