Music determines the atmosphere of a film and marks its narration at least as much as the direction, the subject and the screenplay: not by chance, expressions of the four authors by right of a cinematographic work. Real Pain This is the second film directed by Jesse Eisenberg, the actor of The Social Network. Chopin's nocturnes, studies and waltzes accompany the two protagonists, cousins David and Benji (played by Jesse Eisenberg himself and Kieran Culkin, who has won awards for this role) on a trip to Poland. To be precise, a “Holocaust tour”, in search of the their roots and the house of her grandmother, a Polish Jew who managed to escape extermination and reach the United States.
The music is a sumptuous and pervasive accompaniment to scenes of airports, planes, hotels, trains that, ending up absorbing all the other sounds, seems to give voice to the personal experience of David/Eisenberg who questions the meaning of family and the opportunity to retrace the places of memory.
The starting point is autobiographic, as stated by the director himself who went to visit those lands of origin with his wife in 2008, and the understandable consideration: we are “American creations”, says one of the characters, but if there had not been the extermination we would have been Polish.
The fact is that the private reflection of which the story is an expression remains a little unfinished, and with it the film: immersed in the nocturnal melancholy of the notes of the greatest composer born in Poland (Chopin), to which it pays true homage, fails to go beyond what seems to be the account of a family trip in a small group with a companion. Although there is no lack of passages of various humanity, a certain confusion in the writing cannot be ruled out.
The most interesting aspects are offered by the character played by Kieran Culkin, disruptive and irreverent, who asks questions, goes off the beaten track and split up the group on tour travelling first class (wouldn't they have herded us into these trains eighty years ago to deport us to the camps?). Sparks and flashes of awareness that cause real pain and yet they don't really seem to be able to make a breakthrough in the reality that forgets and absorbs everything.
In the room
Original title: A Real Pain, Production: USA 2024, Director: Jesse Eisenberg, Screenplay: Jesse Eisenberg, Editing: Robert Nassau, Photography: Michal Dymek, Main cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey, Will Sharpe, Running time: 90'.
