Compagna di Viaggio
Traveling Companion movie storyline. In Rome, Cora is a waitress at a club, walks people’s dogs, sleeps with various men, kips with pals, and has a salty tongue. She also has a bruised history: her mother’s suicide, her brother’s mental illness. Ada, a dog-owning client, hires her to follow Ada’s aged and courtly father every day.
The dad, a retired philology professor, has a touch of dementia, sometimes forgetting where he is; Cora is to keep him in sight, phoning Ada if the professor has difficulties. On the third day, he takes a train out of Rome, and Cora follows on what proves to be a journey into her best and worst selves. She becomes his traveling companion, but what does he become to her?
Traveling Companion (Italian: Compagna di Viaggio) is a 1996 Italian drama film directed by Peter Del Monte. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. For her performance Asia Argento won the 1997 David di Donatello for Best Actress.
Film Review for Traveling Companion
Center of the Antonioniesque road movie is Cora (Asia Argento), an angry 19 -year-old who maintains an aggressive detachment from the society around her. She accepts a job keeping an eye on Cosimo (Michel Piccoli), a retired professor clinging to his independence but subject to lapses of memory.
Entrusted by the professor’s daughter Ada (Silvia Cohen) to follow the old man during his daily walks around the city, Cora begins tailing him at a distance but gradually establishes closer contact.
As the improbable duo travel across the countryside, Cora slowly reveals a softer side. Initially alarmed by Cosimo’s apparent aimlessness, she alerts Ada, who has him brought in by cops. But he sets off again, and, eventually, Cora gives in to the professor’s whims. Responding to an affinity between them, she not only assists in his flight but reconsiders her own life.
Eliminating all but the bare essentials, the script emphasizes its points about loneliness and the need for contact in an emotional desert. This is conveyed not just through the principal characters but also through Ada and her husband (Lino Capolicchio), who have their own unease to contend with.
With a more resourceful central performance, this might have been enough to sustain the film. But while Argento easily embodies the tough, unsentimental loner of the opening reels, she is unsuccessful in bringing depth to her character later on. Piccoli’s sparsely worded role is both sympathetic and affecting, supplying welcome moments of minor-key humor.
Technically, the film is solid but undistinguished, apart from Dario Lucantoni’s score, which begins as a lazy tango theme when the characters first take to the streets, adopting more melancholy tones later on.
Traveling Companion – Compagna di Viaggio (1996)
Directed by: Peter Del Monte
Starring: Michel Piccoli, Asia Argento, Lino Capolicchio, Silvia Cohen, Max Malatesta, Elisabetta Rocchetti, Tarcisio Branca, Patrizia Pezza, Christele Procopio
Screenplay by: Peter Del Monte
Production Design by: Mario Rossetti
Cinematography by: Giuseppe Lanci
Film Editing by: Simona Paggi
Costume Design by: Paola Marchesin
Makeup Department: Gloria Pescatore
Music by: Dario Lucantoni
Distributed by: Acadra Distribution (France), Atisbador S.A. (Spain)
Release Date: May 19, 1996
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