‘Hungry Hearts’: When parenthood turns into purgatory

A scene is shown from "Hungry Hearts." The film opens in Turkish theaters on Aug. 7.

Adapted from Marco Franzoso's novel to the screen by writer/director Saverio Costanzo, “Hungry Hearts” comes as an unexpected journey of a film that escalates towards jolting horror. It is not so much a classical horror film, but one that uses the elements of tension and unease to push the audience to question their own conventions of gender-related prejudgments. The film competed for the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival last year and lead actors Alba Rohrwacher and Adam Driver both won the prestigious best actress and actor prizes.

One of the most bizarre meet cutes enfolds in the opening of the film: Mina (Rohrwacher) and Jude (Adam) are accidentally locked inside the lavatory of a Chinese restaurant in New York. It might seem like a great setup for a romantic comedy, but it's absolutely not; Jude is trying in vain to suppress an upset stomach while Mina's five senses are already assaulted by the situation. Nevertheless, they start a relationship.

She's an expat Italian and Jude is an American engineer. Mina radiates a kind of ethereal, Botticelli-esque feminine softness while Jude carries the energy of a modernist born into the Industrial Revolution. Director Costanzo sets up a tricky premise where we are inclined to believe that two different schools of thought, the metaphysical and the rational, are set up against each other through these two characters. But is that really the case?

After an unanticipated pregnancy, the couple get married. Mina doesn't eat meat, but she also doesn't want to eat anything that might be unhealthy for the child and constantly buries herself in books about healthy living. Her lack of appetite and her distaste for any kind of food that isn't purely natural puts her through a challenging pregnancy. Jude and her doctor constantly tell her to eat more for the sake of the baby, but she obstinately refuses as she is not convinced by what modern science has to say about “what's good for her baby.”

An underweight baby boy is born and things seem to head for the worst. Jude acquiesces to all of Mina's wishes as they confine themselves to a life in their apartment where they never take the baby outside and feed him a minimal vegan diet. Mina's overprotection of her child slowly backfires for Jude as he believes his son is withering away in hunger.

At this point we already assume that Mina is a complete nut job and a horrible mother. But why do we immediately think that she is doing something completely wrong other than raising her child the way she prefers? Up until this point in the film, there is no clear evidence that Mina's child-rearing has caused any real harm to her baby, except for the fact that the child is smaller than 93 percent of babies his age. What's only clear here is that Jude wants his child to be competitive, strong and healthy like an ox, ready to take on the world, while Mina wants to protect him from hazards such as pollution and radiation that might be caused by advanced technology and its bigger brother, capitalism. While these two extreme points of view clash throughout the film, causing the main tension in the story, we must ask ourselves why we the viewers find ourselves immediately siding with Jude, when the director specifically leaves the real state of the baby's health ambiguous in the story.

This very intentional ambiguity is the key in making “Hungry Hearts” one of the strongest films of the year, because for truly attentive viewers it will open a whole new dimension about gauging and analyzing our own movie-watching experience and our fixed prejudgments.

The tone of the film has a tendency to shift in an erratic way, sometimes causing confusion. Yet the utterly hair-raising soundtrack keeps one on the edge of their seat, from start to finish. But it isn't till the climax of the film that the true horror comes out in the most unexpected action executed by the most unexpected character. The final act delves deep into David Lynch territory of surrealism, uncertainty and even a bit of the macabre as the battle for “who's going to have the final say over the baby” ensues. It is not easy to swallow, but it definitely has something to say: Go a bit easier on your mothers.