‘A Year Of School’ review: A Swedish girl finds her way in an Italian all-male high school

Dir: Laura Samani. Italy/France. 2025. 103 minutes

Italian filmmaker Laura Samani offers with the load of expectation generated by her 2021 debut Small Physique by taking issues down a notch. Whereas that was a feminist magical realist fable dripping with misty, shape-shifting environment this appears to be a easy teenage coming-of-age story a couple of Swedish lady who enrolls in an Italian all-male technical highschool.

An undertow of niceness and optimism 

Screening in Venice Horizons, A 12 months Of Faculty could also be a difficult promote within the mature arthouse markets reached by Small Physique. However if it lacks a few of the strangeness and surprise of Samani’s debut, it nonetheless works as an enticing comedy-tinged drama of the sort that streaming platforms usually snap up.

Underneath the movie’s shiny floor, Samani is as soon as once more considering borders – geo-political, gender, linguistic – and what occurs when they’re crossed. The placement is the director’s hometown, Trieste, an Italian metropolis that was as soon as the principle seaport of the Austro-Hungarian empir and has lengthy been one thing of a shape-shifter itself, with one foot in Western Europe and one within the East. The motion is about in 2007, when Slovenia’s accession to the EU’s Schengen space abruptly eliminated all border checks between Trieste and the previous ‘Iron Curtain’ simply past its japanese suburbs (one of many movie’s most soppily tender scenes is about in a disused guard submit on the previous frontier).

And but A 12 months of Faculty wears such metaphors frivolously. Adapting a novella written in 1929 by Triestine author Gianni Stuparich, it’s completely invested within the emotional story at its core; that of a liberated, delicate younger girl, thrown right into a den of adolescent males who masks their hangups and uncertainties with informal sexism. When Fred (Stella Wendick) arrives for the primary day of autumn time period at a faculty that’s male by default reasonably than statute – as a result of ladies, in fact, don’t examine technical topics like engineering – she comes up towards an aggressive, testosterone- and insecurity-fuelled force-field that knocks her sideways and sends her residence, on day one, actually denuded.

It doesn’t assist that Fred is international in addition to a lady: at first, she communicates with academics and fellow college students in English. The three guys she ultimately bonds with would make a very good boy band: there’s the delicate poetry-reading one, Antero (Giacomo Covi); the favored but fragile women man, Pasini (Pietro Giustolisi); and the stable, amiable father-bear determine, Mitis (Samuel Volturno). Fred’s gradual transition to Italian after which to Triestine dialect (impenetrable sufficient for passages to be subtitled for Italian audiences) turns into one of many methods by which this vivid, fun-loving younger girl manages an id that can see her go from sexualized prey to one of many lads. Besides, in fact, it’s by no means that straightforward.

For a few of its period at the least, A 12 months Of Faculty is a younger grownup rom-com, a couple of close-knit trio of male associates who all fall in love with the lady who joins their gang – as seen principally from the lady’s viewpoint. For all of the movie’s exploration of sexual politics and gender limitations, for all of the emotional stress that very almost breaks its feminine protagonist, there’s an undertow of niceness and optimism, a nostalgia for an age when independence was thrilling and the long run appeared countless.

Additionally serving to to make Samani’s second function lighter and extra typical than her debut are the scrawled day-glo opening credit and the intermittent soundtrack of era-appropriate pop by Italian indie bands. 4 heat performances by spectacular first-time actors draw us in to the story’s core, underscored by pictures that makes use of pure gentle to light up pores and skin and produce out the feel of garments that comply with the story’s arc from early autumn to early summer time.