Fiore Di Latte | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa

Nostalgia is a beautiful scent. Notes of iris flower, hints of vanilla, bit of pepper brought by life’s troubles, but it's never the same as it was when you first felt it, back in its present. There's this inclination to idealize a potential past because it gives us escape, like a dream, or a movie, but drink it in too much and you risk freezing yourself in place. Charlotte Ercoli’s debut feature, Fiore Di Latte, poses memory—and its failures—as the picturesque backdrop for an anxious comedy about losing yourself in the flavors of the past, and it's maybe the festival’s funnest surprise.

Mark (Tim Heidecker) is a playwright dangling between a deep creative rut and a tight deadline for his next project. Desperate for relief, he turns to the unusual practice of huffing an old Italian perfume to inspire some great masterpiece. Interspersed with memories of his serene summer vacation once upon ago, Mark’s art block unfurls and becomes a manic, scent-fueled journey in the streets of a surreal New York City—all the while alienating his peers, his friends, from the random strangers he meets—supporting turns from stars like Kevin Kline, Gina Gershon, Julia Fox—to his girlfriend Francesca (Marta Pozzan) in his search for the wayward fragrance.

Fiore Di Latte is delightful, and crazy, and I'm struck by the stark raving choices Ercoli makes in developing the kitschy layout of her universe. Her direction is unique in its grainy and nostalgic urgency, wavering across spaces to halcyon both out of focus. New York is a reliable lump of clay for filmmakers to shape—in its gloss or its danker underbelly—and here it’s drawn out to its interior dimensions and to the gnarly ligaments of Mark, played by Tim Heidecker, who, most known for his awkward and anti-humorous standup, brings an uncomfortable pathos to the role where so many other actors might over exaggerate. He's not a caricature, he just acts like one. A distinction that also applies to the film’s whimsy, and its indie appeal.

There are many contrasts at play here. This is a strange movie that ever so often lifts into stranger interludes, Vaudevillian dream sequences, two full musical numbers! Yet Fiore Di Latte punctures wacky with doses of real, and Charlotte Ercoli uses the madness like an easel to paint a woefully accurate portrait of addiction. In the havoc it wreaks, in the weird irony of it: Mark destroys his relationships for the aroma and yet he sniffs and huffs because he can't live without the memories of the love it gives him back.

It's a push and pull the film really succeeds at: the haha what gone to the unfathomably sad. Ercoli is funny like that, marking her story with great jokes that coast on awkward interactions like we’re in a hyper-demented Shiva Baby, however her directorial debut carries deeper miseries on the lengths artists push for art, the despair people push to keep fraying romances alive, and how much they abuse themselves with regret. Fiore Di Latte is a freakazoid take on a tired premise, bold, totally out of the box, and it's a major sign of Charlotte Ercoli as a director to look out for.