La Sapienza

“The treasure of dawn is sapienza.” We also know that the eponymous La Sapienza is beyond knowledge and beauty, but the concept itself is something that Eugene Green, who directed La Sapienza, currently playing at Film Forum, never quite defines. It’s plainly something more than the English translation of sapience or wisdom. Perhaps it’s the work of the legendary Baroque architect Borromini that Green's camera so lovingly caresses. It’s in fact part of the narrative that Rome’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza is at first off limits, much like the recondite knowledge of heaven, earth and esthetics that’s the film seeks to explore. Speaking of knowledge the film's disquisition is much like a Platonic dialogue, a series of stark philosophical discussions that leave the viewer in the position of Plato’s cave dweller, who can only see the shadows of reality on the walls. Alexandre Schmidt (Fabrizio Rongione) is an architect who sets out to write a book on Borromini though his own legacy is one of rationalism. He describes Borromini as the mystical baroque while Bernini is the rational. Schmidt’s own work is that of a man whose feet are unhappily earthbound. His churches are factories and he builds a hospital to acclimate patients to the windowless coffins they will one day occupy. His wife Alienor (Christelle Prot) who has a background in psychology and psychoanalysis attempts to break through his detachment. She’d given birth to a Down’s Syndrome child who her husband had wanted to institutionalize. Along with art, illness is another leitmotif. Alexandre and Alienor journey to Stresa, in the Northern lake region of Italy where they befriend a young woman Lavinia (Arianna Nastro) and her brother Goffredo (Luduvico Succio). Lavinia is suffering from a mysterious nervous disorder that's complicated by the incestuous attachment to her brother. We're literally and metaphorically in Thomas Mann country where spiritual and physical illness are conflated. When Alienor attempts to provide a cathartic cure for Lavinia by taking her to a performance of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, Lavinia remarks that Moliere, who died playing the role, may have sacrificed his life so the character could live on. The associations are like a tornado, swirling upwards with the twists of Borromini’s transcendent style. If La Sapienza eludes interpretation, it may be because of its ambition to raise the viewer’s eyes to an architectural vision of heaven.

The Imaginary Invalid

The death of God has placed a lot of pressure on doctors. There is now a certain madness about medicine with doctors routinely being curated by New York Magazine the way colleges are rated every year by the U.S. News and World Report. It would be interesting to correlate over a period of say ten years how many of New York Magazine’s best doctors list attended the U.S. News and World Report’s best colleges. Naturally this trend has taken some time to manifest itself. Time published its famed Is God Dead? issue in l966. It would also be interesting to study the market to which these varying magazine issues are catering. For instance, are the same people who are interested in medicine also interested in food. If you can find someone who will provide the ultimate cure, is good eating not the next step in survival, preventative medicine as it were. And how many of these foodies routinely travel around the world to find the chefs who will provide the kind of food that is both tasty and healthy? Similarly, if we look at the audience for U.S. New and World Reports Best Colleges, are we not dealing with the question of survival? How many graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth or elite smaller institutions like Amherst, Swarthmore or Williams had roommates who became doctors of the The New York Magazine Best Doctors variety and hence had an inside track on getting appointments which eventually extended their lives? How many of these elite graduates had roommates who became celebrity chefs whose delightful and healthy meals helped them to reduce calories and stress? Moliere wrote two plays Le Medecin malgre lui and Le malade imaginaire. Both would seem to apply to our current obsession with health.