GENOVA. Dir Michael Winterbottom. 2008

Colin Firth is cast as single dad again, a role he plays convincingly. Recently the slightly harassed father of two small children in ‘Then She Found Me,’ this time his daughters are older, 10 and 16 at a guess, and his concerns are different for each one.

Tragically widowed, he’s offered a change of scene – to leave the US and take up a teaching post at a University in Genova, maybe too early for his stunned daughters. His approach to them both is sensitive and relaxed but each character copes very separately with the sudden loss of wife and mother.

The youngest girl is traumatized by feelings of guilt, an astonishingly natural and convincing performance drawn from Perla Haney-Jardine. Disturbing hallucinations cut her off further from her father and sister and, during occasional nightmares, her distress is searing. The older sister (Willa Holland) detaches herself from her father and sister, sampling the Mediterranean life of sunshine and sex, disguising her fragility by playing the epitome of cool.

Striking cinematography puts the audience firmly in the characters’ various viewpoints; we walk the streets of Genova looking up at the buildings, taking narrow dark alleys, losing our way, and Winterbottom’s direction creates a strong sense of unease, uncertainty, and vulnerability.

This is a film in which not a lot happens but it’s cinema as a sensory experience, visual and atmospheric, using light and shadow, inducing claustrophobia, building tension. The climax is necessary and important, in a scene of chaos and threat, of city traffic and panic, and the very real possibility of a second disaster, awakening the older sister to the central issue facing them all, the family is pulled back together. Very fine, realistic, and sensitive.

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