La Sapienza movie review & film summary (2015)

On the shores of Lake Maggiore, the couple encounters an Italian brother and sister in their late teens. The girl, Lavinia (Arriana Nastro), has unexplained fainting spells. When Aliénor discovers that her brother Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) wants to be an architect, she persuades her husband to take the boy along on his voyage through Italy in quest of Borromini’s masterpieces while she remains behind and tends to the girl.

Thereafter, the film shifts back and forth between the two sets of characters as a delicate form of communion unfolds in each. Both the architect and his wife, we learn, have suffered tragedies that have left them wounded, guilty and cold. Interacting with their young charges brings them back to life through caring and mentorship. For the wife, this means telling the girl about the blow that has left her marriage desiccated. For the architect, it’s recounting for the boy the story of Borromini’s tumultuous life – a distant reflection of his own – as they traverse Italy looking at his buildings, which are sumptuously photographed as supreme icons of beauty and spiritual expression.

The architect explains the intense rivalry between Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The latter’s art, he says, is highly rational while the former’s is mystical. Again, the man is telling his own story. “I am Bernini,” Alexandre says, though he obviously aspires to Borromini’s mysticism. In conveying all this to Goffredo, he seems to rekindle a passion and a determination that had been smothered by his adult life’s difficulties and his adherence to the modern orthodoxies of materialism and secularism.

The film’s essential gists, which won’t be strange to anyone familiar with Western mystical thought from Plotinus onward, can be illustrated by reference to a couple of scenes. In one, Goffredo invites Aliénor into his room to see the model of an ideal town he has constructed, one that’s centered on a sacred building called The Temple. She asks what religion it is for, and he says all religions. But what about people who have no religion, she asks. Even they can feel the “presence” that the architect’s use of space summons, he answers. And how does the architect do this? “Through light,” he says.

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