The Missing Star (La stella che non c’è)

Gianni Amelio’s new film explores the cultural divide between West and East through the character of Vincenzo, an Italian engineer who finds himself on a startling, life-changing voyage. “The Dismissal,” the best-selling novel that inspired The Missing Star, is a story with many dimensions. In Amelio’s sensitive hands, it is a moving tale about an obsessive desire to right a wrong. But Vincenzo’s near-messianic voyage is as complex as the man and the culture from which he has come. The Missing Star is also a road movie, tracing a trip from Italy to China and, once in China, across and through its vast landscape. The middle-aged Vincenzo, wonderfully embodied by Sergio Castellitto, is an engineer working in a steel mill near Naples. When a Chinese delegation comes to buy a blast furnace from his company, Vincenzo feels he must warn them about a potential fault in the machinery’s control unit. The buyers, however, ignore his advice, dismantle the furnace and pack it up. After determining how to fix the suspect part, Vincenzo sets out alone for China with the mission of finding the furnace and giving the piece to the new owners. Landing in Shanghai, he has only the name of the Chinese interpreter who visited the mill with the delegation: Liu Hua (Tai Ling). However, she is suspicious of Vincenzo, as his behaviour caused her to lose her job. And locating the blast furnace in a country as massive and enjoying such spectacular growth as China summons comparisons with needles and haystacks. As Vincenzo’s journey carries him deeper and deeper into the country, Amelio gently teases out the lessons of the tale’s developing metaphorical dimension. He has always been the most adept of filmmakers at exploring moral dilemmas and creating characters whose lives embody these tensions. Vincenzo is a truly great imaginative creation: unpredictable, stubborn, arrogant, obsessive – yet gentle and determined to do good. His foil is the young Liu Hua, and it is their story that serves to illuminate the cultural difference between West and East.