Primavera (2025)
Opera directors making the leap to cinema tend to fall into one of two traps: they either forget that film has its own grammar, or they remember too well and spend two hours proving it. Damiano Michieletto, in his narrative feature debut, largely sidesteps both pitfalls. Primavera is a confident, handsome Italian drama set in early 18th-century Venice, adapted by Ludovica Rampoldi from Tiziano Scarpa’s 2008 novel Stabat Mater, and it arrives with enough festival credibility (Special Presentations at TIFF, Audience Award at Chicago) that the attention is mostly justified.
Cecilia (Tecla Insolia) is twenty years old and has spent her entire life inside the Ospedale della Pietà, Venice’s celebrated orphanage whose resident orchestra was the envy of the continent. As an extraordinary violinist, she finds her reward is a grille to perform behind, playing for wealthy patrons who applaud without ever seeing her face. The arrangement says a great deal about the relationship between institutional power and individual talent. Everything shifts with the arrival of Antonio Vivaldi (Michele Riondino) as the new violin teacher: mercurial, ambitious, genuinely gifted, and at least partly aware of which of those qualities matters most in any given room. Under his influence, Cecilia begins to conceive of a life not allocated to her by the orphanage, its governors, or the marriage market that awaits those who eventually leave.
The film’s most immediate strength is Daria D’Antonio’s cinematography. Her Venice is cold and mercantile; the light falls on stone with a kind of indifferent authority, and the canals look like what they were: arteries of trade. Michieletto, who has spent decades staging opera on major European stages, brings a director’s instinct for visual composition and a musician’s sense of rhythm. And the combination, more often than not, works. The Pietà reads as what it was: an institution, part orphanage, part music conservatorium, part social management strategy. That grounding gives the film a welcome hardness that its period costumes might otherwise have obscured.
Insolia carries the film with measured control. Her Cecilia is watchful and internal, a young woman who has spent years learning that survival involves the careful rationing of visible feeling. When she finally allows herself to want something openly, the shift registers with genuine force. Riondino’s Vivaldi is, in my opinion, a more mixed proposition. He is energetic and watchable, but the role as written offers him little purchase beneath the surface. Stefano Accorsi appears in a supporting part that suggests complications the script never quite commits to, and Fabrizia Sacchi brings real moral texture to the Prioress, a figure the film could easily have filed under Institutional Villain but does not.
The film’s weaknesses are structural: the second act finds a groove and stays in it longer than it should. Some sequences seem content to let the music carry weight that the writing has not quite established. And given that the music is Vivaldi, it is very good at that job, which makes the problem harder to detect and no less real. The deployment of La Primavera (Italian for spring) is the film’s most predictable move and also, I’ll admit, one of its most effective, which suggests the film knows its own tendencies and has made a kind of peace with them.
The image that stays is Cecilia at the grille, visible to no one, playing for everyone. The film grasps something true about the gap between talent and recognition: that access, not merit, is usually what decides it. Whether that observation lands with the force it deserves depends, I think, on how much the script trusts the audience to sit with it rather than underscoring it. Primavera largely trusts its audience on this point, though there are moments when the score steps in to do the work the script has left undone.
As a debut, it announces a director who knows how to make things beautiful and is still working out how to make them necessary; a gap worth watching close.