“On the long summer days, a butterfly is born at seven in the morning and dies at six in the afternoon. How can it understand the meaning of the word night?” asks the character of Camila (Susú Pecoraro), in love with a priest, in the film of the same name by María Luisa Bemberg, released in 1984.
Although due to clerical norms, the conventions of the early 20th century and illness, she may not be able to understand all the extensions of that feeling, the meaning of the word love will be understood by Adelina (Andrea Doimeadiós) in the short film shown at the television The Novice Gardenerdirected and written by Arturo Sotto for 2022, based on his own story.
She, interned in a cloister of nuns, wants to love, vehemently; –And trying to express her thoughts in the lyrics– is her “punishable” sin. But the young woman’s platonic love will prove as fleeting as the life of the butterfly in Bemberg’s film.
Adelina frantically loves and desires the clergyman Gabriel (Daniel Romero). He will not have the possibility of another priest, the one in the film The crime of Father Amaro (Carlos Carrera, 2002), of attracting the beloved into his arms. The closest thing to something passionate here is the sequence – joyfully filmed, edited and performed – in the confessional, when she reveals her attraction to the monk and he becomes enraged. The priest will also be delirious with joy/madness when he puts together the messages that Adelina left him among the roses: the latter one of the most beautiful, lyrical plot solutions conceived in the short film.
Both will not be able to stay together in time, because the Spanish flu will end the young man’s life. But the love that united them in such a short period will surpass the arc of their lives, the convent and their time, through the book that compiles the messages of the rose bush.
Almost everything in The Novice Gardener It could be on the verge of crossing the thin line of corniness, or vulgar melodrama, but it is redeemed by the tenderness of its story, the truth of characters who meet in the middle of a time when it was believed that humanity was going to perish ( the same as when the short was filmed, in the midst of COVID-19) and the interpretive ductility of Andrea Doimeadiós.
She shines during the sequence in which she observes the priest, as he documents the nuns about the Spanish flu. In that face of the actress, transmuted into a world map of emotions, joy and amazement, there is something of the Olivia Hussey who contemplates Leonard Whiting in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) and, also, of the mischievous rapture of the girls of Le pupille (Alice Rohrwacher, 2022), confined in a Catholic orphanage during World War II.
With this latest Italian medium-length film, with expressive forms intentionally subordinated to a tessitura that borders on the nostalgic, the retro and the admiring towards cinematographic tradition, the short film by the director of Vertical Love shares both the stylistic vocation and the faith of going against the grain of trends or fashions. And equally, the intention to pay much less attention to the limited budget than to the enjoyment of germinating a story of which what will remain in the retina will be the pieces of life, so limpid, so endearing, cut out against the candor of his frames.
