Sara Fgaier’s “Weightless” has a dreamlike quality and the essence of vapor. You can almost feel it; its weave of memories in their light skeins wafts past you. Memories are what prop up the film. A character revisiting his life isn’t an inspired narrative starting gun. Amnesia intrinsically gives rise to a plot driven by a melodramatic register and a weepy tone. Yes, loss drapes itself over the entire film, but it is not dialed up with the usual recourse.
We watch a slow journey of a character coming to terms with a deep loss, that of love that anchored him. The emphasis here is on memories clouding and becoming unfoggy by turns; what is it that we can feel certain in our knowledge? What happens when we lose our hold over those who we felt would sustain and be by our side throughout?
Loss is an overwhelming, disorienting emotion, capable of sundering ties with coherent reality itself. To deny it a place is to recede into a deep corner of the soul. Everything has to be re-negotiated and re-understood in order to let things fall into a plane of emotional acknowledgment. At 65, Gian’s (Andrea Renzi, subtle and shell-like and drifting phantom-like) amnesia is primed in the film as the starting point whereby we are ushered into his past, specifically his youthful years. He has wiped off everything that may remind him of his wife’s passing. He struggles to find his bearings and is mostly lost. When his daughter, Miriam (Sara Serraiocco), whom he doesn’t recognize, passes him his journals, he riffles through them, transporting us to the 1980s.
These sections dominate much of the film and are rendered in a wispy, fragile texture. We are always reminded of the transience of times and situations, even while the film foregrounds the depth and intensity of a particular given moment. Now-ness is highlighted in most of the film’s extended flashback portions. The emotional exactitude of characters at a point in their relationship accentuates itself with a thrilling force of life and potency.
The film is imbued with a fuzziness, a sense of the fleeting. But there’s also a steady reassurance in things returning, of promises being reprised long after one has abandoned hope. The story is infused with a touch of magic and idealism, suggesting that the absence of immediate fulfillment doesn’t necessarily equate to the loss of love and hope. You never know who will descend for a brief while to anchor you back to earth in moments when you consider everything is forsaken and life to have ended.
“Weightless” is a film of soft edges. Romance and beauty rub shoulders with subdued grief and mourning. Processing loss necessitates a pained walk through a maze of memories. His odyssey in his boyhood gains center stage, as does a one-night tryst with a woman, Leila (Lise Lomi), who’s training to be an aviator. This Mediterranean dalliance is at the heart of the film, etched with exquisite tenderness and transmitting the passion in the connection that happens between the two, which is strong enough to pull them through distance and time.
In the span of one night, they know they have something special and irreplaceable between them, but circumstances compel them not to be together for some time. They promise a reunion after five months. The site of the meeting is promptly finalized. While Gian does make it on the scheduled day, Leila is nowhere to be found.
Juxtaposing memories with a dizzying patchwork of archival footage, “Weightless” combines emotional soberness with reclamation and acceptance within a visual framework that is ever so light on the surface. Past and present fold in on each other, with the boundaries being nearly translucent and unfixed. It’s the style and sensuous intimacy within the narration that takes this film several notches above yet another memory piece.
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