Syllables.
'La casa degli sguardi', a film by Luca Zingaretti.
In the photo: a screenshot shared from the trailer of 'La casa degli sguardi' (2024), direction and screenplay by Luca Zingaretti[1]; starring Luca Zingaretti and Gianmarco Franchini. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Daniele Mencarelli[2] (2018).
An excellent debut as a director for Luca Zingaretti, who in this film plays a father, with a freedom that marks lucidity from the novel it is based on, and with a fidelity to the meaning that the director earns as the film progresses, to the point that by placing it alongside the novel, the film necessarily completes it. These are two appointments that the film manages to fulfill and resolve, restoring credibility to the text which, certainly with personal suffering, here becomes however tangled and frayed.
First there is the appointment with the father, which the director revisits by reversing the role inside out, as he plays a man who, although recently widowed, does not give up in front of his son who become entangled in drugs: working in a service cooperative at the children's hospital will be a decisive turning point, the teamwork for the young man is a genuine novelty because the former life, so imaginary and persecutory with fixations and obstinacies will become little by little insufficient and boring, up to leading to a test of a speech that finally will produce listening. "But do you hear yourself when you speak?", his father asks him at last.
And then there is another appointment, certainly not planned: a child hospitalized calls him from beyond the window glass with a gesture, or rather a speech of only three syllables : and it is a super-power the child likes very much because it produces listening to him.
The structure of a language – which is never automatic – can produce listening, and it is an individual power : because it leads the game to the other who received that speech.
Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – October 10, 2025
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[1] Luca Zingaretti (1961), is an Italian actor and director: after attending the ‘Accademia Nazionale d’Arte drammatica’ in Rome and the lessons of Andrea Camilleri, he made his theater debut with the director Luca Ronconi, and then in cinema (‘Gli occhiali d’oro’ – 1987, by Giuliano Montaldo; ‘Il branco’ – 1994, by Marco Risi; ‘Castle Freak’ – 1995, by Stuart Gordon; ‘Vite strozzate’ – 1996, by Ricky Tognazzi; ‘Artemisia. Passione estrema’ – 1997, by Agnès Merlet; ‘Rewind’ – 1998, by Sergio Gobbi) often playing characters who really existed, and also for television (Pietro Nenni in ‘Il giovane Mussolini’) and receiving his first public appreciation. Since 1999 he began playing the police commissioner Montalbano, the protagonist of many novels by Andrea Camilleri, for a long and successful TV series, in the meanwhile continuing the cinematic ativity.
[2] Daniele Mencarelli (1974), is an Italian poet and writer: after making his debut in the magazine ‘clanDestino’ (1997), he published (2001) ‘Bambino Gesù. Ospedale Pediatrico’ for the ‘Tipografie Vaticane’ and then (2013) ‘La croce è una via, poesie sulla passione di Cristo’ for ‘Edizioni della Meridiana’. ‘La casa degli sguardi’ is his first novel (2018), which received very good comments and early appreciation, including being adapted into a film directed by Luca Zingaretti. In 2020 he won the ‘Premio Strega Giovani’ with the novel ‘Tutto chiede salvezza’, and in 2021 he published ‘Sempre tornare’ again with ‘Arnoldo Mondadori Editore’.