Mousy and diminutive, to the point that she practically disappears beneath a frizzy bramble of brown hair, Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci) adores movies. In “Finally Dawn,” she stumbles into one, drafted into being a featured extra on a swords-and-sandals epic shooting at Cinecittà. Doing so makes Mimosa a potential target in a meandering true-crime-adjacent period piece inspired by the death of Wilma Montesi, which plays like an Italian spin on the Black Dahlia case. An aspiring actor, Montesi might have gone on to be a star, but instead, she was chewed up and spit out by the film industry, as countless women were. Here is the story of what might have been.
Pitched somewhere between “L.A. Confidential” and “Two Weeks in Another Town,” the film — an original idea from director Saverio Costanzo, best known for adapting Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” for RAI and HBO — features its share of movie stars (both as characters and as key members of its ensemble). But it’s told from an outsider’s point of view: a pinch-me-I’m-dreaming day in the life of a nobody who stumbles into the sparkling glitter globe of showbiz. In that respect, the wide-eyed Antonaci proves a good fit to play a character so diffident, her mother describes her as “docile.”
The year is 1953, and Montesi’s body has just been discovered on the beach. Her killer could well be a member of the film industry, or one of the many hangers-on — oily, entitled men with money — looking for girlfriends or a good time from among the parade of pretty ladies who pass through Cinecittàs gates. More than any of the flesh-and-blood actors, the main attraction here is the famous Rome-based studio where films such as “Ben Hur” and “La Dolce Vita” shot back in the day. In recent years, the site has hosted TV more than features (although an effort is underway to lure movies back, and “The Equalizer 3” filmed there).
Engaged to marry a porky policeman, Mimosa wouldn’t have stepped foot onto Cinecittà at all, except that her more conventionally head-turning sister Iris (Sofia Panizzi), a voluptuous Gina Lollobrigida type, was spotted at the cinema and invited to audition. The offer is a transparent ploy by a total stranger (Andrea Ottavi, who looks like the human equivalent of one of those ahooga wolves seen drooling in Tex Avery cartoons) to seduce her. During the audition, the producers bully the giddy young woman into removing her top — the first of many instances in which predatory men exert their power over women in the movie — rewarding Iris with a role.
Mimosa goes along strictly as emotional support, but she’s “discovered” by leading lady Josephine Esperanto (Lily James) walking down a back corridor. Before she can even register what’s happening, Mimosa’s being outfitted in hair and makeup to play one of the pharaoh’s handmaidens (in another feminist statement, the movie-within-a-movie here is a skewed retelling of Merneith’s reign, in which the leader is portrayed as violent and duplicitous). Costanzo indulges in a long excerpt from the movie in question, featuring lots of terrible acting — which may or may not be intentional.
The performers in “Finally Dawn” are its weakest feature: big and broad, prone to pantomime, clashing with whatever it is their colleagues are doing. In the great Italian tradition of Pasolini et al., actors seem to have been cast for their faces more than their capacity to become someone new, and in the case of the English-speaking ones, give cringey line readings. Lily James has been dolled up to look like a glamorous Hollywood celebrity, but she conveys nothing of that imperious hauteur the greats (and even the second-rates) of that era projected, thereby failing to convince as either an A-list star or a pharaoh. The character might have been inspired by any number of real-life legends — my money’s on redhead Rita Hayworth, who dressed similarly in the abandoned, Rome-based “The Story of Joseph and His Brethren.” Her co-star, Joe Keery, plays an American named Sean Lockwood with all the gravitas of a Disney Channel star. At times, the acting in here is downright painful (though Willem Dafoe breathes impish life into his bilingual role, while the others stick to their native tongues).
Better to focus on what Costanzo’s trying to do with Mimosa’s surreal path through this world, which begins on the Cinecittà backlot (where the director uses sound to spark the imagination, teasing an entire world beyond the frame, which he later pays off with actual widescreen re-creations) and spills out into a Cinderella-like evening. Like the late Wilma Montesi — whose death sparked a whirlwind of speculation from the public, and whose tragic fate is awkwardly recapped by newsreel in the film — Mimosa becomes a vessel for the imagination. She barely speaks for most of the movie, as others project their fears and fantasies onto her. Josephine tells dinner guests Mimosa’s a poet, and they believe her. Insecure about his own talent, Sean swoons for her, certain that she’s a greater artist than he is.
Attending a party in the mansion where Montesi was last seen, Mimosa drifts through the rooms much as Burt Lancaster did in “The Leopard,” a ghostlike observer to the carnival unfolding around her. But neither these ghouls nor a lion escaped from Cinecittà poses much in the way of peril to a woman who’ll fade back into the woodwork tomorrow. One can sense what Costanzo’s trying to do, but he’s made a fatal miscalculation: Mimosa is not leading lady material, and 140 minutes is far too long to spend pretending otherwise. As Stanislavski put it, “There are no small roles, only small actors.” Here is a case when a huge role has been written for and about a small actor — and it shows.