50-year-old Alexandre Schmid has arrived at a stage in his life where nothing excites him, neither his job as an architect nor his marriage with Aliénor. On vacation in the Lago Maggiore region of Italy, the couple meets Goffredo and Lavinia, a brother and sister who are very close. Because Lavinia suffers from a strange disease, Aliénor feel drawn to her. Meanwhile, Goffredo, who is very interested in architecture, follows Alexandre to Rome, in the footsteps of Francesco Borromini, the great architect of the 18th century.

Picture gallery

Eugène Green, the director of Pont des arts and La Religieuse portugaise, has his own cinematic language, and woe betide those who attempt to see one of his movies without prior preparation. The dialogue is artificial, faces seem disinterested, camera angles are systematic, direction is slow: what is striking about La Sapienza is that it is a thousand miles from modern convention. In Green’s film, the illusion of cinema is not hidden but updated at the risk of testing the uninitiated. It is easy then to just reject the whole thing reflexively or through intellectual laziness. Because although La Sapienza may not offer enough emotion or abstraction to quality as a real “art” film, and it may seem brutal and off-putting, it still remains astonishing proof there is enough freedom in cinema and that not everything needs to be pure entertainment.