Alba Rohrwacher

In Maria (2024), Alba Rohrwacher’s Bruna cooks meals nobody eats and tells truths nobody wants to hear. We were moved by those uneaten meals, because she makes the effort of caring count in a film that otherwise keeps its central figure at a distance. Alongside Pierfrancesco Favino’s patient Ferruccio, she gives Pablo Larraín’s film its warmth. Angelina Jolie’s Callas receives the grand treatment, with Edward Lachman lighting her like a painting. Rohrwacher makes the downstairs scenes matter without competing for that attention.

I Am Love (2010) helped bring her to a wider international audience after the early breakthrough of My Brother Is an Only Child (2007). As Elisabetta Recchi in Luca Guadagnino’s melodrama, she belongs to a film we recommend with reservations about its pace and overbearing music. Tilda Swinton’s sensitive performance remains its chief strength. Her work as Mina opposite Adam Driver in Hungry Hearts (2014) asks more of her physically. Her slight, nervy presence can also sustain close attention to one woman under pressure.

Alice Rohrwacher has repeatedly cast her in films about rural or marginal Italian life, including The Wonders (2014) and Happy as Lazzaro (2018). That continuing collaboration does not guarantee the right result. In La Chimera (2023), Alba plays Spartaco, the dealer buying the tomb raiders’ finds, and the business is too broad. The wealthy collectors are already easy to distrust; the film has little else to say about them. We recommend it warmly for its humour, sadness and freedom, but Spartaco belongs among its limitations.

The risk is that casting directors see the nerves and ask for nothing else. Repeated parts as anxious or repressed women can narrow what she is allowed to do. Bruna gives her something firmer to play: a woman willing to tell the truth as well as prepare the food. Her scenes with Favino cannot make us recommend Maria as a whole. For a stronger film around her, start with I Am Love, and allow for the music.