Wishing on a Star

Original title: Wishing on a Star

Directed by: Peter Kerekes

Country: Italy / Slovakia / Croatia

Length: 109 min.

Year: 2024

Premiere: Venice Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: Luciana is an astrologist that offers a peculiar service, in which she finds the right destination for her clients to align with favourable stars. 

RATING: 4/5

 

REVIEW

There are films that inadvertently transcend their own scope through details, or form. Wishing on a Star is one. In a way, a return for Peter Kerekes to a mood not dissimilar from his earlier works, it still somehow feels influenced by the experience with 107 Mothers to a point that it questions every canon of the documentary-fiction distinction.

Astrology, or rather astro-therapy, is the subject of Wishing on a Star. Astrologist Luciana's peculiar service often feels more like a therapy session, due to the sort of questions she asks her clients, to understand their needs. Her proposal of traveling to syncronise with favourable star alignments is at the center of a film that is not interested as much in the astrology or in its disproval, but its human effect regardless of its veridicity.

In Wishing on a Star, the screenplay lies in the editing process: bits of dialogues are pieced together to build fully functional scenes, with a comedic timing so precise that it envies any so-called fictional counterpart. The astrologist Luciana and her clients have an on-screen energy that rivals any carefully constructed cast. The overall result is a film in which it is impossible to perceive that this is not a classical mise-en-scène, but a group of people that portray themselves. Kerekes is well known for his performative intervention with the subjects, but the claim for this film is that due to the language barrier, this was impossible, at least to a large extent, and that the manipulation really took pace in other departments, such as the editing room.

The previous film by Kerekes, 107 Mothers, unintentionally simbolises the rise of a new sensibility in east european cinema that sees the involvement of non-professional actors and their personal experiences in the story. Just a year later, this was replicated by Damian Kocur in Bread and Salt, and after that, Stepne by Maryna Vroda (produced by Kerekes himself). With Wishing on a Star the stakes seem higher, being that the entire film is derivative of the lives of its protagonists, and built around them to create a sort of dramaturgy. 

Such brilliance is matched only by the relatively humble scope of the film, in no way a work that aims to be a game changer, in no way something experimental in the traditional sense. Yet, Wishing on a Star is a challenge to fiction and to documentary, to any sort of nomenclature that film theory applies to cinema.