Irene Dionisio’s Idda is a movie about vibes, but it’s also a movie about feelings. It’s the best kind of combination, because half the movie looks and feels like you’re living a dream, or like you are the story behind a photograph. The rest, however, is a smart deconstruction of the friendship between two women and what it means to care for someone very different from you.
The movie follows a children’s dance teacher, Sofia (Romana Maggiora Vergano), who returns to her hometown to meet her childhood friend Adele (Tecla Insolia). Adele works as a photographer, and she and Sofia could not be more different. And yet they still have one thing in common: their joint desire to climb Mount Etna, an active volcano on the Eastern Coast of Sicily.
If that makes this sound like a survival movie, it’s not. Mount Etna is, at times, almost as big a character as Adele and Sofia, but this isn’t a movie about climbing a mountain, at least not a real one. Instead, it’s a movie about a complicated friendship, one that at times feels like it shouldn’t even be described as such. And yet, that’s part of what makes Idda so compelling.
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So often, stories about women, even those told by women, are simple, straightforward affairs. People fall in love, become friends, have kids, or in some cases, do bad things. But rarely are women and relationships between them allowed to be messy, complicated, and ultimately even a little bit destructive. It’s easy to fall into the spell of the story Dionisio is trying to tell, mostly because it’s very hard to anticipate what that story is.
There’s a certain magic to the way Idda is shot that must not be discounted. Dionisio’s steady directing gives many visual cues, and that, alongside Vergano and Insolia’s focused and intimate performances, gives the impression that, in Idda, we’re being told a story that belongs only to them and us. No one else can know it. No one else needs to.
But this is more than a visually engaging film, though it is that. It’s a profound exploration of what friendship is and the role memory plays in the relationships we choose to keep. That those themes are explored with the volcano as a narrative tool only makes it all the more compelling. Especially because Sofia and Adele are two different sides of a coin: Sofia too happy to go with the flow, Adele too mired in resentment to even consider that possibility. Each could learn something from the other, but the two never find the time or space to reach a middle ground. That’s the sad part.
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We’ve seen plenty of movies about female friendship, some way too superficially about girl power to really be impactful. Idda is about that bond, but also about the reasons why a bond like that could break, and about the love and the pain that comes with it. Mount Etna isn’t the only thing that erupts in this movie, and by the end, it feels like the volcano isn’t even the scariest part.
Because we recognize the feelings. The wonder, the joy, the pain, and the overwhelming fear of how life could change. But there’s nothing we can do against any of those. Just hold on and hope that, once the lava passes, we’re still left standing.
Idda screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
