Directed by: Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel
Written by: Tizza Covi
A life story that blends fact and fiction, Vera starts on the fashionable streets of Rome. We are following Vera; a woman glamorous-to-excess, as she attends a film festival. She is not the main attraction, but it is her name, her surname, that has got her here. She is Vera Gemma: socialite, actress and daughter of Italian film legend, Giuliano Gemma.
Playing a fictionalised version of herself, Vera is involved in a car accident. Her driver (Walter Saabel) accidentally knocks over a young boy. Manuel (Sebastian Descalu) has broken his arm. Guilt-stricken, Vera builds a relationship with the boy and his father, Daniel (Daniel Del Palma). Their life is a world away from Vera’s. But beneath the rough edges, there is a family unit that Vera craves. As Vera becomes more involved with their lives, her friends worry she is getting too close.
What starts off as an insular exercise, opens out into an exploration of family, loss and identity. We are witness to Vera floating through Rome’s high society, searching for connections. She often seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She is sent to a film audition, but her agent has forgotten to tell her it’s for a period piece based on the German philosopher Schopenhauer. Vera has arrived in a clingy, revealing dress that makes it impossible to see her as anything else.
It is this disconnect that informs the rest of the film. Vera’s wealth and privilege are as much a barrier as they are a shield. Her vulnerability also marks her for those who would take advantage. In a frank conversation with her sister, Sorella, her scoffing assessment of Vera’s current boyfriend is that he “exists today, tomorrow he doesn’t”. He is one of a long line of exploitative people who come and in out of Vera’s life. When she refuses to finance a film he is making, he dumps her in a restaurant. She is of no further use to him.
In the moments where Vera is with her family – watching Super 8 movies with her sister; walking through a cemetery with a friend – screenwriter Tizza Covi lets us see Vera in her unmade state; contemplating a life of opportunities missed. As she walks through the cemetery, her friend shows her the grave of Goethe’s son. There is no other name. The young man, who died before his poet father, is given no identity of his own. The struggle to be seen and heard is not just a modern concern.
Vera treads the line between fiction and biography beautifully: there are scenes that feel ‘real’, cultivated from Gemma’s own life, and Covi’s screenplay treats these with a delicate hand. The tone is elegiac: we shift from the mourning of a childhood spent under the Hollywood gaze; to an adult life filled with regrets and a sense of self that never quite finds its true articulation. Part biopic, part cautionary tale; the truth, when it is revealed, is far from simple.
Vera is screening at watchAUT Austrian Film Festival from 23-26 March 2023 at Ciné Lumière, London.
