Tommaso

Willem DaFoe in Tommaso.Tommaso, the new film written and directed by Abel Ferrara (which begins streaming tomorrow) is an imaginative work of creative psychotherapy that swings from delight to frenzy. In this loose combination of autobiographical material drawn from Willem DaFoe and Ferrara, Dafoe plays a screenwriter living in Rome. Ferrara has cast his own wife, Cristina Chiriac, and their 3-year-old daughter as the family. Domestic scenes were shot in the director’s apartment by way of a hand-held camera. The result is that we feel we are taking in a spontaneous documentary, albeit punctuated by energetic flights of fancy. For Ferrara, interweaving present fantasies and his past are integral to how he makes art. So it is should not be surprising that this expressionistic profile is short on plot — it is a portrait of  the messy internal life of an artist. It is a carefully structured landscape of the mind — a personal statement filtered through the dreams of two friends.
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