"Hungry Hearts," starring Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher, was one of the biggest surprises for me at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. The film turned out to be nothing like what I expected, and I couldn't be happier about it. The way director Saverio Costanzo masterfully transitioned the genre from a sappy romance to a gut-wrenching suspense, backed by a surprisingly powerful performance from Driver, makes "Hungry Hearts" one of the must-sees at Tribeca.
It starts off as another quirky New York City love story. Boy meets girl by chance when they accidently get locked inside a one-stall bathroom together in the basement of a Chinese restaurant. Jude (Driver) is an engineer, and Mina (Rohrwacher) is an Italian national working at the embassies. They fall in love, she becomes pregnant, they marry. During her pregnancy, Mina has recurring dreams about a dead deer. It leads her to a fortune teller, who tells her the child will be an "indigo child" - a child meant for great things. Soon Mina begins looking at alternative medicines and diets. It starts with her insistence on having a water birth and then, once their son is born, becomes an insistence on having the newborn adhere to a special vegetarian-like diet meant to purify the body. Tensions grow between Jude and Mina when she refuses to let their now-malnourished infant go outside, let alone see a doctor. Her devotion to her child's "organic" lifestyle begins to border on neurotic, putting her and Jude at odds over how best to care for him. As their son's health continues to deteriorate, they each must decide how far they will go to do what they believe will save their child's life.
Parts of the narrative may seem comical or even satirical to read, but they come across as anything but when you're watching the film. Costanzo sets you up to expect the conventions of a romance-genre film, then he toys with you, slowly changing the mood and the tone into a psychological thriller straight out of a Roman Polanski or an Alfred Hitchcock film. Indeed the scenes in the apartment, gradually made claustrophobic and unsettling by Costanzo's tight close-ups and distorted wide-angle lenses, seem reminiscent in some ways to Polanski's "Repulsion," with the biggest difference being "Hungry Hearts" is grounded in a very real situation. Few directors - not even David Fincher in "Gone Girl" - can smoothly change a film's genre halfway in, so kudos to Constanzo for doing it successfully.
Driver surprised me by how well he acted in the film. Although his performance started off slow for me, he turned out to be perfect for the role of Jude. His character was still the perpetually exasperated and ready-to-go-off everyman you see on "Girls," but he made it work. Driver turned in a truthful performance that let you really empathize with the character and the dire situation he finds himself in. Jude is visibly torn between the naïve optimism he can make his crumbling marriage work and the startling reality his wife is insane.
