Parky At the Pictures (29/5/2026)

(Review of Illusione)

ILLUSIONE.

At the outset of her directorial career, Francesca Archibugi had a love affair with the Donatello Awards. She won Best New Director with her feature bow, Mignon Has Come to Stay (1988), and Best Film with both Towards Evening (1990) and The Great Pumpkin (1993). The major awards might have dried up, but Archibugi has remained one of Italy's most respected film-makers, with dramas like With Closed Eyes (1994), Shooting the Moon (1998), Tomorrow (2001), and Flying Lessons (2007) being followed by a string of comedies, A Question of the Heart (2009), An Italian Name (2015), and Couch Potatoes (2017).

She has returned to more serious topics of late, with

Vivere (2019) and The Hummingbird (2022) now being followed by Illusione, which is screening in London this weekend under the auspices of CinemaItaliaUK. Having been moved by the fact that a headline report about a dead body being found in a ditch in Perugia received no further press coverage because it was no longer deemed newsworthy, Archibugi reunited with the co-scenarists on her previous picture, Francesco Piccolo and Laura Paolucci, to provide an empathetic memorial to a young woman the rest of the world had forgotten.

When Deputy Commissioner Giovanni Pizzirò (Filippo Timi) is called to the discovery of a girl's body in a ditch, he realises she is still alive and has her rushed to hospital. After the teenager is billeted in a children's home run by nuns, deputy prosecutor Cristina Camponeschi (Jasmine Trinca) is assigned to the case, along with child psychologist Stefano Mangiaboschi (Michele Riondino). But the victim is intimidated by Cristina's brusque manner and warms to the newly appointed Stefano, who has just returned to Perugia after completing his studies. Giovanni is convinced that Rosa's plight is linked to the Eastern European mafia trade in prostitutes and cocaine, but Cristina is intrigued to find out how she came to the city from France.

In a flashback, we see 15 year-old Rosa Lazar (Angelina Andrei) win a beauty contest in Bucharest, where cousin Sorin persuades her Moldovan mother (Adriana Papana) to let him oversee her bid to become a model. Mrs Lazar is worried that the naively impressionable Rosa will fall into the wrong hands, as gangster Dragan Popescu (Marius Bizou) had tried to tap her up at the venue. But she leaves Buftea in the hopes of emulating a local girl who is now modelling in Paris. During an interview with Stefano, Rosa reveals that her grandfather had been a bigwig in the Communist party, while her father had been jailed for murder. She also shows him how she can write with her foot and Stefano notes that she seems far too cheerful for someone who has been through an ordeal.

Having sent Rosa across Europe on a bus, Sorin meets her in Strasbourg with his girlfriend, Doanna (Anastasia Doaga), who introduces her to a lesbian who works as a prostitute on the German side of the border because clients can be arrested in France. Rosa is excited to be in such a glamorous city and gets her first taste of champagne. But she has no idea what is going on around her, even when the lesbian becomes amorous while they are being filmed dancing together and Sorin has to reminder her not to corrupt Rosa because she is destined for great things.

Rosa repeats the dance for Stefano in his office, as Sister Lucia (Aurora Quattrocchi) tries to snoop at the door. His wife, Susanna Bormoli (Vittoria Puccini), sees the picture that Rosa snapped sitting on Stefano's knee and she worries that he is letting the case get out of hand. But she says nothing, even when Rosa texts him late at night after telling the other girls in the dormitory that he clearly fancies her (and tells them to say nothing, as she doesn't want him to get into any trouble).

Clients at the Aramis nightclub in Strasbourg recognise that Rosa is very young and lives in a dreamworld. Cristina has also latched on to this, but suspects Rosa is shrewder than she appears and follows up her organised crime hunch by putting tails on Louis Garcia (Alain Van Goethem) at the Aramis club and Dragan. Stefano can't decide, however, whether she's playing games or just terrifyingly ingenuous especially after she claims to be looking at photo of herself and her mother on his phone, when the image is of his pet dog. He tells her that things can't be beautiful all the time and she clings to him calling for her mother.

Back in Strasbourg, Sorin is arrested and Doanna has to hand Rosa's passport to one of Dragan's minions. However, Cristina doesn't believe this side of her story and asks Stefano to try to get Rosa to name some names instead of being evasive and claiming no one harmed her. He wants to quit the case and tells Susanna, only for her mother, Flaminia (Francesca Reggiani), to arrive in the middle of the night and wake the twins. She is fascinated by the case and tells Stefano that he should be writing a book.

Sister Lucia complains to Giovanni about Stefano's conduct around Rosa and he asks Cristina to have him removed from the case. He also tells her that he has a bad reputation, as he once smashed a kid in the face. Giovanni also thinks that Susanna abused her position at a surrogacy agency to get her twins. But, as Cristina is under huge pressure to nail Dragan and his trafficking racket, she refuses to sack him, as he is the only one whom Rosa trusts enough to talk to.

Dragan takes Rosa to Brussels, where she meets a member of the European Parliament who wants to spend time with the `Moldovan virgin', even though he is impotent. Back in Perugia, she sees Oncle (Miko Jarry) being interviewed on television and imagines that he tells her that he is going to make her a model in Paris and bring her mother to live with her. This episode is reported to Cristina and Stefano, but Rosa claims not to know Oncle's real name and insists he did nothing indecent to her and that she isn't a whore.

Susanna urges Stefano to withdraw, as she is worried that he is becoming obsessed with Rosa. However, he reassures her that he knows she is a vulnerable child and only wants to help her, as he would their teenage daughter, Teresa (Giulia Rebecca Chiari). When Rosa sees them together on the street, however, she gets jealous and runs through the rain back to the orphanage, where Sister Lucia has barred Stefano from entry because she thinks he's a pervert. Someone also leaks his past to the press and Susanna takes the kids to Flaminia in Rome because she didn't know about his assault incident with a classmate (who had taunted him about his dying mother). But Flaminia asks him three questions down the phone that chear him to her satisfaction and she urges him to keep his story for a book that will sell like hot cakes.

Cristina is angry with Giovanni for persecuting Stefano and insists he brings Rosa to her office. They show her photographs of prominent MEPs and she flinches when she sees Oncle. As she has no proof of them being together, however, they can't press any charges. Unable to hack into the Cloud to retrieve data from Rosa's missing phone, Cristina despairs, until she gets hold of a password.

The phone was lost when Dragan sold Rosa to some Albanian gangsters because Oncle had become so obsessed with her that the situation was becoming dangerous. ?? had felt sorry for Rosa and helped her make contact with Nadja, a famous Romanian model whose father had worked for Rosa's grandfather. She is shooting a commercial that requires her to fly on a harness through a disc of feathers and she tells Rosa to wait for her, having presented her with a new wardrobe. But the teenager is abducted from the changing-room and bundled into a van and taken the Perugia hideaway of Adriatik (Antonio Scarpa). He is nervous about her being a virgin (because they bring bad luck) and the rumours she is a witch. So, his henchmen cut the cards to see who gets to deflower Rosa, but the winner spares her by running a blade through the palm of his hand to bloody his shirt. When she goes out on the streets with the other girls, she is told to run and that's how she came to be found in the ditch.

Having slept with Stefano (who had realised that she had been nursing a broken heart), Cristina is informed that the IT unit has found her evidence on the Cloud, as Rosa had taken selfies with all of the men who had paid to see her, including Oncle, who turns out to be the President of the European Parliament. Commended by her superior, Cristina gives Giovanni the order to make local arrests, while forces in France, Germany, and beyond pick up 38 traffickers from the names and addresses found in the phone files.

Time passes and Stefano returns to Perugia after the publication of his book. Sister Lucia allows him into the orphanage on Rosa's birthday. But she is on medication and is disappointed to discover that her visitor is not her mother. Taken aback by her dispassionate reaction, but still wishing to help her, Stefano meets with Cristina and she arranges for him to collect Rosa's mother so that they can be reunited in Italy. She offers to cook him one of her chickens (which Rosa has always told him were infected) and he smiles in declining. But they go inside her simple house, so she can pack a few belongings for her trip.

Echoes of Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985) reverberate around this involving, but discomfiting drama and, on the evidence of her debut display, Angelina Andrei has the talent to follow in the footsteps of Sandrine Bonnaire. She is mesmerising as the winsome, but callow teenager, who drifts through life with a guileless delight that makes her unable to discern the dubious motives of those around her. Her performance is all the more impressive, as she persuades the audience to go along with some of the screenplay's more convoluted passages.

Archibugi and her co-writers allow themselves to become bogged down in places, while the flashbacking structure can sometimes feel cumbersome. The action can also occasionally seem cluttered, as minor characters flit in and out when the time might have been better devoted to the reasons for Cristina's melancholy and Giovanni's bitterness. Stefano's violent misdemeanour becomes something of a MacGuffin, as does the truth about his twins. But the decision to give the good guys murky sides and copious contradictions renders them more human and their efforts to do the right thing while carrying the baggage of past mistakes makes them more intriguing.

There's an stiflingly queasy tension to Michele Riondino's scenes with Andrei, as she clings trustingly to him and he tries to support her without overstepping the boundaries. Every now and then, Stefano appears conflicted and it might have been more interesting to examine how the case messes with his mind than to have him tumble into bed with Cristina (in a scene that makes him look creepy) or be browbeaten into penning a bestseller by his mother-in-law. The typically excellent Jasmine Trinca might have been given more to do, especially as Cristina is conspicuously the only woman in the chain of command from the prosecutor down to the deputy commissioner.

In addition to intelligently forging the connections between power and exploitation, toxic masculinity and female fragility, and organised crime and corruptible officialdom, Archibugi also condemns the enduring East/West divide in Europe. Having Oncle be so prominent in the European Parliament feels a bit contrived, but the balance between social drama and psychological thriller is deftly maintained. Francesco Di Giacomo's photography capably contrasts the look and feel of Buftea, Strasbourg, Brussels, and Perugia, while editor Esmeralda Calabria handles the numerous shifts between time and place with clipped efficiency, as Archibugi avoids sensationalism while coaxing an exceptional performance out of Angelina Andrei. It will be fascinating to see how her cinematic journey unfolds.