A subtle film which, as the title indicates, primarily tells a story without words. Non ho parole is built up of five separate visual narratives or, as Misuraca calls them, ‘movements’; he compares the construction of his film to that of a piece of music. The parts are separated by the music of Erik Satie and Misuraca has in common with this composer that his work is lucid, meticulous, intense and playful.Misuraca evokes a special kind of melancholy with a clever and spacial mise-en-scène which suits his modest yet universal love stories. The stories are linked thematically by the fact that they are all about loneliness in the modern age, their stylistic unity is the restrained style of Misuraca. He very effectively juxtaposes colour and black & white and, despite the lack of dialogue, the sound track is rich and inventive.Misuraca thinks that cinema generally tends to resemble prose, while the richness of cinematographic poetry remains untapped; his film is obviously intended as a poem in pictures. The director rebels against the television-induced realism of the current Italian cinema and he emphatically seeks to align himself with cinematographic stylists such as Dreyer and Bresson in order to express something about present-day Italy with his own visual vocabulary.
