I know how to be married to exactly one person. I claim nothing more. And even those who know me might quickly point out said knowledge is personal delusion. I make no claim whatsoever as to know what marriage or compatibility in general is all about. However, there is something I picked up along the way that seems to ring true: For two people to be sympatico in the long term, they have to, bare minimum, agree on three issues – politics, religion and children. If any one of these doesn’t sync, eventually the relationship will have problems. (Yes, yes, we all have anecdotal counter-examples. But I’m pretty sure this holds true, and you do, too, if you really think about it.)
Hungry Hearts is a movie about the child incompatibility aspect. The example here is not is number of children, but instead the raising of same. Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) and Jude (Adam Driver) meet in the single-serve downstairs bathroom of a Chinese restaurant. Mina doesn’t recognize the room is occupied and is immediately penalized for it when the two find themselves locked in together … Jude is having stomach problems. Yes, the tired meet-cute of girl locked in a public restroom with boy punishing a toilet. Cliché, but timeless.
Mina is on loan from Italy; she doesn’t speak the language especially well, but she is instantly fond of Adam. When she gets pregnant, her life is immediately New York-centric, especially as she has no living relatives. And when she collapses from malnutrition while in her seventh month, the fun begins.
I have no idea what inspired Saverio Costanzo to make this film, but it had to be something. You don’t just make a very detailed plot about the battle over an infant’s nutrition without having an axe to grind, do you? Mina is a strict vegan – animals are poison and her infant son isn’t to partake no matter how sickly he looks. Jude is a realist; he shares Mina’s vegan views, but he’ll toss them in favor of a healthy child; he also will happily take the boy to a pediatrician, something Mina distrusts. As the baby’s health deteriorates, you just know violence is on the horizon.
Mina is presented as off-her-rocker; the screenplay roots decidedly for the father here. Does Mina represent crazy vegans, or perhaps anti-vaxxers, as her antipathy of medicine man voodoo suggests? Oh, and she never leaves the house. As the film progresses, Mina also wears less and less clothing in the apartment, not in a sexy or endearing way, but just to
let us see how emaciated she is. This is a good idea, because while you can’t really starve an infant for the sake of art, we can guess how the child is suffering based on mom’s concentration camp chic. Hungry Hearts feels sorry for Mina: she is alone. All alone. Crazy, yes? But alone. And her obsessions find her more and more isolated.
Hungry Hearts is a painful film to watch. For the sake of the child, Mina needs to be controlled, but legally and with her consent, neither of which has a prayer of happening. So instead, the film gives us scene after scene of two relatively nice people plotting against one another while their infant slowly dies. It’s hideous and awful, but I cannot deny the emotion. This was a film made by somebody who needed to make a statement. I don’t know who was the inspiration for this ire, but I truly hope it was Jenny McCarthy.
♪Got a wife and kid in Tribeca, Phil
She’s one loony bird and making our baby ill
Like a dingo and an elephant seal
This ain’t gonna be right no matter how good we feel
The trio of us all have hungry hearts
Our discordant diets have ripped us aparts
Don’t bother mixing it in Cuisinarts
The trio of us all have hungry hearts♫
Not Rated, 109 Minutes
D: Saverio Costanzo
W: Saverio Costanzo
Genre: Child abuse
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Social service second-guessers
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Vegans
♪ Parody inspired by “Hungry Hearts”
