‘Comandante’ Review: Eduardo De Angelis’s Well-Crafted Wartime Sub Drama Is Out Of Its Depth As An Opening Attraction – Venice Film Festival
deadline.comA 73m x 7m submarine was always going to be a left-field substitute for A-lister Zendaya after Luca Guadagnino’s hotly anticipated tennis movie Challengers was pulled from the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious opening-night slot.
And although the gargantuan Cappellini is a formidable presence in Eduardo De Angelis’s 1940-set war drama, Comandante seems woefully out of its depth as a curtain-raiser to a festival still reckoning with the effects of the SAG strike.
Held together by a very strong performance by Pierfrancesco Favino as sub commander Salvatore Todaro, De Angelis’s film takes a long time to set sail, beginning with a strange prologue in which we see Todaro plunging into the sea.
This is his first brush with death, and it leaves him severely disabled, being forced to wear a back brace and prescribed serious doses of morphine. “I like you disabled,” says his wife Rina (Silvia D’Amico). “It makes you a prisoner of me and my intentions.” This sounds pretty dark, but, in fact, she just wants him to take his war pension and retire to the countryside with her and their young son.
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