The Future (2013)

A surprisingly compelling movie. Two Chilean teenagers living in Rome (Bianca and Tomas) became orphans when their parents die in a car accident. Living now alone in an apartment, they soon drop school and find some jobs to sustain themselves: she in a hair salon, he in a gym. Soon, Tomas brings two dubious friends from the gym to live with them in their apartment. These friends, who seem to easily manipulate Tomas, eventually engage Bianca in a seemingly harebrained plot: she has to seduce a former bodybuilder and sword and sandals star named Maciste (played by the veteran Dutch actor Rutger Hauer), who is blind and lives as a recluse in an old mansion in Rome, so she can find the safe in his house where he presumably keeps his fortune. So the rest of the movie is about how the strange relationship between Bianca and Maciste develops. Only the ending is unsatisfying. Playing Bianca, the pretty, petite Manuela Martelli looks a bit sour and expressionless, but is compelling as she appears about half the running time in the nude along the much older Hauer. Based on a novel by the prestigious Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño.

4.5 of 10. Something like a outsider/emo teen film, but in Italy. Lots of style and flair around lots of propaganda, product placement, and a big story hole, possibly admitted to at the end by a guilty director. It's the type of teen/young adult formula story I'm surprised isn't more frequently used in USA films. Apparently we're not as empty as Italy when it comes to film.While the cast does a lot to carry the film, the direction and story is little more than a slice of life film. It makes for an impressive acting exercise for all involved.Given that's it's apparently based on a book, and books usually can't get by purely on words describing hot naked chicks, melodrama, and cigarette smoke, maybe something got left out.

Would like to give to have given this film a 7.5 if it was available. Neither the positive review from our local arts newspaper, or the one fairly negative user review already on IMDb "Downbeat Erotica"capture my experience of 'The Future,' seen with a friend at the Vancouver International Film Festival yesterday. Perhaps I was disposed to find value in the film as I had to rearrange my normal Sunday to see it, and I had picked it on the strength of its synopsis, the few available reviews and the role that Rutger Hauer has in it (he is forever associated, for me, with the role of the replicant "Roy" in Blade Runner.) My companion liked it less than me, saying for her, there was something missing in this film. I wouldn't call it my most memorable film ever, but I was very engaged with the main character's journey and several features of this picture intrigued me: • the essential ugliness of the slice of Italy depicted (playing against tourism clichés) especially as it seems to be richly tied to the main character, Bianca's psychological state; as Bianca's mental state changes she remarks on her surroundings reshaping themselves • like the magic realism of the sun that never sets, there is a close relationship in the film between what we see in a supposedly realistic lens, and what is going on for Bianca and to some extent, for her younger brother. It's like a film demonstration of Freudian "projection" • I enjoyed that an inversion between stereotypes of light and dark occur in the thrown-out-of-kilter world of the two orphaned teenagers. Rather than a descent of darkness into their lives in the wake of their parents' sudden death, Bianca and Tomas are beset with insomnia inducing daylight. • the villains are venal, petty, and better housekeepers and cooks than the heroine and her sidekick brother; while they bring a moral mess into the lives of the teens, rather like the serpent offering the apple to Eve, they have quirky traits such as excelling at crosswords and knowledge-based game shows, and are decidedly deficient in the quality of menace • there was a point (no doubt, partially due to Rutger Hauer's appearance in the film) when I thought this film was paying some tribute to Blade Runner's soundtrack, with its pulled-inside-out gongs and weird sounds, and in certain scenes, with the Blade Runner look, with the sudden plunge into chiaroscuro darkness in the apartment of the former Mr. Universe Maciste, played by Hauer. I think the eroticism the other IMDb reviewer touched on should be qualified as very cinematographic and not especially pornographic. Bianca becomes as beautiful and exotic as an oiled, living sculpture in the setting of the blind man's dark mansion—which bears some resemblance to the rambling, toy-filled apartment of J.F. Sebastian in Blade Runner.Still, I was quite uneasy with being asked to accept Maciste as a good guy when he has apparently been buying teen prostitutes for some time, because he treats Bianca nicely and feeds her. It also felt like the final reel fell off the truck on the way to the editing studios; suddenly we wrap up, with one brief sequence, perhaps, supporting why the Bianca of "The Future" has labelled herself as a criminal at this time in her life. We don't get to know what happened to blind Maciste when he followed her out of his refuge of many decades. What? Either an art house ending or maybe the money ran out.

The film opens with the death of two teenager's parents, leaving them to live by themselves. Money is tight for Bianca and Tomas but the arrival of two shady guys from the gym where the latter works changes everything. They put forward a scheme to rob a reclusive actor who was famous in the 60's for playing the character Maciste in peplum movies. Bianca is sent in to seduce him but things don't play out as planned.Il Futuro is a strange film that isn't really story driven at all. The crime angle that underpins the narrative is ultimately not especially important, more a device of linking Bianca to Maciste. What made the film most enjoyable for me was Manuela Martelli who was not only good in the central role but also added a strong sensual dimension to proceedings. She spends a considerable amount of time naked and covered in oil which does ensure that this is a drama that has a definite erotic angle. Rutger Hauer is additionally an interesting presence, even if his character essentially remains somewhat enigmatic.So what does it all mean? Not a huge amount I would venture. The title seems to refer to the fact that the central character's present is poor and the future is all. Bianca uses sex as a means of moving forward but it doesn't work and things end with her and her brother having learnt a few lessons from their experience. I suppose it's a coming-of-age film in some ways. But mainly it works best as a slightly left-field erotic drama; more a slice of life rather than a story.