Product Description

When Sabina’s father dies, she is left haunted by a terrible dream that becomes a living nightmare. She seeks out her only sibling hoping to find an answer… while keeping her daunting journey a secret to those she loves most.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36558 in DVD
• Brand: LIONSGATE ENT.
• Released on: 2006-08-15
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Italian
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 120 minutes

Features

• An Italian melodrama starring Giovanna Mezzogiorno (LA FINESTRA DI FRONTE) and Alessio Boni (LA MEGLIO GIOVENTU), DON'T TELL is based on the director's own novel of the same name. Mezzogiorno plays Sabina, a voiceover artist living happily with her actor boyfriend, Franco (Boni). Sabina begins suffering from nightmares that bring back unwelcome memories from her childhood, and almost simul

From The New Yorker
Several of Italy's top young actors populate this Italian drama about the lingering, paralyzing effects of repressed memory. Sabina, played by the beautiful, liquid-eyed Giovanna Mezzogiorno, is troubled by anxieties she can't explain and tormented by enigmatic nightmares about her childhood. She can't speak of her fears to her adoring and equally beautiful actor boyfriend (Alessio Boni) or to her smitten childhood friend Emilia (the glum, reed-thin Stefania Rocca), so she reaches out to her brother (Luigi Lo Cascio), a university professor in the U.S. whose remoteness is well suited to his chosen home: the forbidding, obsessively neoclassical Charlottesville, Virginia. Cristina Comencini, who wrote and directed the film, may overdo the drama at times, but this excess is made up for by the richness of the performances and Comencini's imaginative way of making locations seem pregnant with meaning. In Italian.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

The Damages of Suppression
'La Bestia nel cuore' ('The Beast in the Heart' released in the USA as 'Don't Tell') is an intense Italian film written and directed by Cristina Comencini that tackles subject matter so visceral that the telling of it requires complete concentration from the audience in order to feel the power of the impact at the end. It is a tough film to watch because of the story, but it is a superb film to watch because of the excellent cast and production crew.

Sabina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) is introduced to us in a cemetery where she is arranging for the interment of her dead parents: the mood for the story is subtly set. Sabina is a dubbing actress for translating films into Italian, a 'sell-out' acting job compared to the life of her live-in boyfriend Franco (Alessio Boni) who is a stage actor being tempted to accept a role in a TV series which pays more money than the stage. Sabina confesses she wants to get pregnant, she does, and with her pregnancy she begins to have nightmares of shadowy childhood memories. She is afraid to discuss these with Franco, or with her best friend Emilia (Stefania Rocca) who is blind and has been in love with Sabina since childhood. It seems the only person with whom she can confide her secret fears is her brother Daniele (Luigi Lo Cascio) who has moved from Italy to Charlottesville, VA where he is a professor at the University and has a happy family life with wife Anna (Lucy Akhurst) and two children. Sabina flies to the US to be with her brother and in the course of their reunion the two siblings uncover the beasts in their hearts: sexual abuse from their father now departed. How this discovery alters their lives is the dénouement of the film.

There are many subplots - infidelity on the part of Franco while Sabina is away, a lesbian relationship that develops between Emilia and another of Sabina's friends Maria (Angela Finocchiaro) - and Comencini draws subtle parallels between these twists along side the main story of incest discovery. Yet without concentration, these subplots can become distracting.

The acting is on the highest level and the changing locations are shot by cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti with sensitive respect of the nuances of suggestion encased in each place. The uncredited musical score is an admixture from Robert Schumann's piano sonata to contemporary works and serves to heighten the actions and mood. In Italian with subtitles. A film well worth watching. Grady Harp, August 06

Italian Cinema At It's Best
Who say's Italian cinema is dead? With such films as "The Best of Youth", "Bread and Tulips", this marvelous film. "Don't Tell". The Italian cinema is alive and thriving more so now than it has since the fading of the masters Fellini, De Seca, and Visconti.
Film is the only great art from of the United States. We have no other artistic history that we can call truly ours. In Italy there is a great history of art and literature that is original, groundbreaking and innovative. Italian cinema as more in common with American film than it does with the rest of Europe. The Epic was born in Italy with "Quo Vadis" in 1913 and the advancements of the Italians influenced D.W. Griffith and others in burgeoning Hollywood.
American films were loved in Italy pre 1939 and after the war as well. Each country has devoured the other's film product with gusto and learned in the process what great cinema could be. The two cultures influence and shaped each other's new art of the 20th century. Operatic, melodrama, and grand sweeping emotions are at the core a staple of both cinemas. So what does this have to do with "Don't Tell" you may wonder?
This brilliant film is bi-national, in that it is set both in Italy and the United States. It has a sense of blending of the two cultures and there differences as well in doing so it shows an Italian point of view of America. It is a great and revealing thing to see the USA from a European perspective. This jumped off the screen for me and added a deeper layer to the film
The story is indeed deeply moving and the film's cast does remarkable work in the telling of the story of repressed memory and what happens when it is awakened. Of particular note are Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Alessio Boni , and Luigi Lo Cassio (These two actors played the brothers in the incredible "The Best Of Youth" and it is a treat to see them again working together.) The film is richly presented with some wonderful cinematography. A film I highly recommend to lovers of Italian cinema.

Don't Bother
I always thought that while movies about incest were shocking in, say, 1975, that path had been well-worn. Not to say that I'm only looking for shock in movies, but I found this renouned drama to be rather flat and bloodless. Sure the acting is good, but the script is rather pedestrian, the characters uninteresting, and after the end we don't get a sense that much has changed. And it's all told so slowly, with lots of portentious flashbacks (it reminded me in that regard of Barbra Streisand's Nuts, another overpraised film) as though there's this great profundity when in fact there's nothing but banality. I was waiting for the twist, the surprising insight, but it never came. The video box is plastered with awards and nominations, but compared to the ground-breaking Italian cinema of Fellini and De Sica and other, lesser names, this is banal television. Can't say I'd recommend this, unless you're looking for something light. Yes, light. It seems odd to describe a movie about incest that way, but 2007 isn't 1975.