
Images courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films
FINALLY DAWN— 2 STARS
LESSON #1: A NIGHT WITH THE STARS– Finally Dawn hinges on the collision between fandom and stardom. Even with its post-World War II period being far before today’s times of social media-driven celebrity access and a massive cycle of multi-pronged tabloid coverage, the matinee stars of cinema still carried a hold over awestruck commoners. Their mere public presence added to their legend. Finally Dawn grants a fan a night with her idols, a scenario that radiates with dream fulfillment.
Leaving the movie theater one day with her mother Elvira (Carmen Pommella of The Hand of God) and younger sister, Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci, in her film debut), a twenty-something Roman woman named Iris (I Told You So’s Sofia Panizzi) is targeted by a studio talent scout. He is leveraging the chance to audition as an extra for a big Hollywood production chronicling the story of Merneith, the first female Egyptian pharoah, filming currently in the city as a way to pursue Iris romantically. Accompanied by Elvira, the two sisters arrive at the famed Cinecitta studios with dazzled hope.
At a sketchy casting call sequence in Finally Dawn, the classically beautiful Iris is chosen as a crowd extra for the sword-and-sandal epic, but the bashful and introverted Mimosa is not. The confused Mimosa wanders the studio areas looking for her sister, only to catch the eye of Josephine Esperanto (Cinderella star Lily James), the top star of the picture playing Merneith. Seeing something in her unspoiled face, Josephine demands Mimosa be taken on and costumed as the featured extra, a step up from the “cattle car,” representing her fixed eye contact point during a climactic confrontation with the male lead, played by American actor Sean Lockwood (Stranger Things mainstay Joe Keery). The source of focus works as Josephine nails the scene and moves Mimosa to tears.
LESSON #2: WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH THIS CHANCE?— Mimosa made enough of an impression because the head costumer brings a gifted red evening dress from Josephine to Mimosa with the invitation to join her and Sean for the evening. The is a chance the other cast members and actresses would kill for. As the audience of Finally Dawn, this turn of events begs this lesson’s question of viewers. Who, on the level of Josephine Esperanto to Mimosa, would you want to hang with as a special guest? What would that fantasy entail? How would you respond or act?
The extremely apprehensive Mimosa, who is supposed to have a family dinner that night with her proper and parentally-selected fiance, meets Josephine’s personal driver and handler, Rufus Priori. Played by Willem Dafoe, flexing his impeccable Italian language skills acquired through his 20-year marriage to film director Giada Colagrande in a choice part, Priori coaxes the young lady, who pressingly feels the need to find her mother and go home, into joining the festivities. From there, Finally Dawn whisks this girl away, and opens her eyes to how the other half lives and how fancy stars carry themselves.
With the cameras not rolling and primed for a night on the town, an examinatorial spotlight in Finally Dawn turns to Lily James’s decadent diva. The international star is coming out of her third marriage, attracts an entourage, and covets keeping Sean on her arm, even though he finds himself drawn to his mousy guest. Josephine gives Mimosa the cover name of “Sandy” when introducing her around and crafts her an imagined background as a soulful poet from Sweden.
LESSON #3: WHAT IS THE PARTICULAR FASCINATION?— While Finally Dawn baptizes Mimosa into this luxurious world, we, the audience, are left questioning Josephine and Sean’s intentions. Played with an uncomfortable level of meekness by the newcomer Rebecca Antonaci, the Italian girl is impossibly shy in every situation charted by writer-director Saverio Costanzo in this Golden Lion-nominated film from the 2023 Venice International Film Festival. To be intrigued by the possibilities of Finally Dawn, either some impressionability or glimmer of appeal needed to surface in the Mimosa character to merit her inclusion in this nighttime odyssey, or a deeper pull of allurement, be it beneficial or vile in purpose, had to come from Josephine or her tier of associates.
Instead, Saverio Costanzo treads water in gray areas, which is likely the ambiguous point. In her wandering, Mimosa is made aware of a recent news story investigating the recent death of a local unknown actress whose body washed up on a nearby beach, creating a parallel and precedent possibly coming for her next. In a scene where a slightly jealous Josephine gathers a hoity-toity crowd of party guests to put Mimosa on the spot to read one of her poems as Sandy, the lost kitten freezes and crumbles, only to have uncharacteristic empathy wash over the embarrassed onlookers who, in a silly fashion of happenstance, take her stunned silence as artful stoicism to celebrate.
Between the possibility of grooming an inspired companion or a discarded conquest, neither route from Lesson #3 arrives or is fully committed to in Finally Dawn. The Josephine character is clearly a maven of her own control, a quality clearly enhanced by James’s showy performance, yet the escalating envy never feels plausible. Mimosa is a nobody who could be removed with the flick of her hand and the taxiing exit of Rufus. Why bother if there’s not something special to either exploit or squash? Joe Keery’s Sean follows the same wishy-washy pattern, inexplicably doting on Mimosa one moment and blowing her off another.
If Finally Dawn is trying to shame foppish, aloof, or two-faced Hollywood behavior permeating overseas away from their ironclad domestic reputations, it needed a louder mouthpiece or taller stump. If Lily James is the headliner, more exploration was needed elevate her spectre. One underutilized character that could have been a lamplight of truth through Finally Dawn was Rachel Sennot’s supporting actress and Esperanto co-star Nan Roth, someone eschewing the star’s social circle and its contagious disillusionment. Sennot is too good an actress to be given this little to do, especially in a drama that takes its time and money to quite novelly recreate a massive and sweeping Hollywood on the Tiber film production.
Circling back to Lesson #2, if you are granted such an adventure of the finer things, how does an innocent and modest woman like Mimosa ever go back to her mundane life, especially when the cocaine shows up and she possibly sees these people for who they really are? The film’s answer is as quiet as its protagonist. Finally Dawn takes what should sizzle with sensuality and eye-opening bewilderment and finds malaise. Somehow, in the parting coda, Costanzo chose to drop the needle for “Last Nite” by The Strokes for the credits of a sumptuous period piece. That’s a baffling choice for a finishing flourish, as if Semisonic’s “Closing Time” was splashed at the end of Casablanca. If this was true, topical satire where that final beat hit, Mimosa would be taking her walk of shame down the historic and photogenic Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti, as she does, but with a pep in her step wearing a t-shirt that says “I Spent the Night with Josephine Esperanto and Sean Lockwood, and All I Got Was a Red Dress, a ‘Dear John’ Poem, a Stroll with a Lost Lioness, and a Long Story No One Will Believe.”





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