“Paternal Leave will make you want to call home and see your loved ones if you haven’t in a while.”

After a fight with her mom, 15-year-old Leo flees her German home to track down the father she has never known. He turns out to be an Italian surfing coach who lives in a boarded-up beach cafe in Marina Romea, a village in the northern Italian region of Emilia Romagna on the Adriatic Sea. It’s winter in this small seaside town and like any such place during the off-season it’s squalid, cold, and grey. Yet out of this simple plot there emerges a grand narrative worthy of Neptune.  

The success of this little-film-that-could is mostly due to its amazing casting and a great DoP. The central duo are played by Juli Grabenhenrich as Leo, a force of nature in her first on-screen role, and Italian movie and TV star Luca Marinelli (Martin Eden, Mussolini: Son of the Century, The Eight Mountains), who plays Leo’s father Paolo as an everyman we wish could be in our everyday lives. Forget his looks (in itself nearly an impossible feat), Marinelli is an actor who turns any part into a memorable one. He is utterly believable as the misguided, Peter Pan semi-failure that Paolo is meant to be. 

But perhaps being judgmental here isn’t the right thing to do, since the film’s writer and director Alissa Jung, best known to German audiences as a successful TV actress, never turns a critical eye to her characters. Least of all to Paolo, who juggles life as best he can and still tries to live by his Zen principles. It doesn’t hurt that Jung is married to Marinelli and in Paternal Leave she lets us discover the actor’s most tender side, a side we can imagine is normally only witnessed by his closest family, and ends up making the film just that little bit more special. 

Leo’s part is also a tour de force. She comes out, metaphorically, battling and kicking like a wild colt, and is relentless in demanding what she needs, even when she realizes that Paolo can never be the dad that was missing from her life for 15 years. Paolo had a summer fling with her mom, though he insists at one point when arguing with Leo that it was more than that. He now has another little girl with a local woman, and is trying not to repeat the errors of his past – but is already falling into the same traps, a sad knuckle-biting experience to watch.   

But back to Leo and Paolo. One speaks German when she’s mad, the other yells in Italian when he’s at the end of his rope, and yet these two understand each other deeply, because the way Jung has written their roles makes them eerily similar in nature, down to the way they fight and make up. As an audience it is a pleasure to be a fly on the wall of their arguments, and even if the finale may seem predictable, it’s still a bated-breath wait to find out if our hunch is true.  

The supporting cast includes Italian character actors Arturo Gabbriellini, Joy Falletti Cardillo, and Gaia Rinaldi, all noteworthy for their great performances. And perhaps an added character is the town itself, with its endless sand dunes and wind, intermittent fog, grey skies and salty air – an Italian everytown to go with Paolo’s Italian everyman.  Another layer of quality is added by Austrian DoP Carolina Steinbrecher, whose cinematography gets us into those sand dunes of a coastal town left overwhelmed by beach erosion, and into the interiors of the run-down bar and the old van which are essentially Paolo’s home. The camera even follows Leo and Paolo as they go surfing on the frigid sea and later as they watch the flamingo colonies that inhabit the Po Delta.  

Paternal Leave will make you want to call home and see your loved ones if you haven’t in a while. For this writer, it made me wish I could have talked to my father more while he was still alive, and perhaps I too could have discovered the deeper nuances of a man who became a dad without yet having discovered the man within himself. Just writing about the film makes me want to watch it again, as its rhythm and the poetry of its message are simply and beautifully overwhelming.

Image copyright: Match Factory Productions, Wildside