Cabrini
In Alejandro Monteverde’s giant, old fashioned biopic about a great woman (overlong but still impressive), Francesca Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna) has a confrontation with the mayor of New York City, whom she has finally won over after he spent most of the movie being villainous and sabotaging her work. He is drinking with her at her mission when he tells her “It’s too bad you’re not a man. You would’ve been an excellent man.” She looks at him for a second and then says: “A man could never do what we do.”
This film is directed by Rod Barr and written by Alejandro Monteverde, who made “Bella,” which also involved several characters being tested in their faith through physical hardship. The women in that movie were more likable than the central one here; all those actresses had to do was look into Eduardo Verastegui’s sweet, sad eyes, whereas poor Dell’Anna has to spend this whole movie wearing an expression that says “Lady, I know I am responsible for saving the lives of many people including orphans and prostitutes right now, but please stop asking me to talk about my feelings because it is literally 1902.” Anyway, said harder-looking character believes that when we are forced to be strong in front of men all day because they will not let us have any power unless we are already physically stronger than them, we grow extra muscles somewhere else. That is why women like this can be so indefatigable even when they seem to be dying. Another thing this movie does very well is show what it used to be like for women who wanted money or sex or both in New York City in 1902.
Francesca Cabrini brings Giancarlo Giannini (the Pope Leo XIII) to New York with her because NYC it says on the screen was ruthlessly hostile towards the Italians, who were mostly women and children at that point. Also they do not care about the Irish anymore because it is 30 years after “Gangs of New York.” At first nobody wants to help Francesca open her orphanage in an abandoned factory on Cabrini Boulevard that was donated by a rich lady, but then several other women do help her, including a nun who has no lines but is always there and gets more screen time than any other character except John Lithgow (the mayor). The prostitutes are nice to Cabrini because she gives them money and clothes, also she saves their lives on multiple occasions. At one point Francesca’s health is failing so badly that she has to be taken away from Five Points in a horse drawn ambulance like some kind of racist cartoon.
Francesca keeps trying anyway. She starts learning English so that she can tell off people who insult her in their own language. She learns how to cook Italian food for immigrants who do not know how to cook Italians. Those two things alone take up about an hour of the movie, which is only 127 minutes long.
However, together with his cinematographer Gómez de Andreu, Monteverde rewards your eyes. In “Cabrini” there are a number of beautifully composed shots and classically sweeping lighting that shoots beams of light and shadow through New York’s floor to ceiling windows it’s the kind of middlebrow, big screen period piece that used to play in theaters regularly just a few decades ago. But these days, movies like “Cabrini” deserve gratitude simply for committing to such a sumptuous cinematic palette and, well, looking like a movie. One shot in particular is pure cinema: A group of kids sing Verdi’s “Va pensiero” chorus to an Italian opera singer as an appeal for his public support; it tastes like the flavor of a movie from years ago.
If Alejandro Monteverde sounds familiar, it may be because his name was attached to last year’s ridiculous and wildly controversial box office hit “Sound of Freedom.” There is no controversy attached to “Cabrini,” which instead quietly asks its audience what kind of city or country or world they want to live in one that privileges a few at the expense of many, or one built on true equality? Cabrini and her Sisters believed fiercely in the latter; they built something that should be celebrated alongside what any Rockefeller or Vanderbilt accomplished (to paraphrase one journalist who covers their work). It’s not perfect, but this is damn good a proud movie about brave women whose story has been forgotten.
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