Before It Had a Name

2007
3.2| 1h30m| PG-13| en
Details

A young Italian woman inherits from her deceased lover an enigmatic modern house in the New York country side, and goes to see it for the first time. When she arrives she meets the caretaker of the house.

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Trailers & Clips

Also starring Giada Colagrande

Reviews

SunnyHello Nice effects though.
Rpgcatech Disapointment
Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
rooprect There are 2 versions of this movie: the sexually explicit one and the censored PG13 one. My review is about the PG13 one which is 91 mins and released in the USA as "The Black Widow" by First Look Entertainment. And when they say it's PG13, they ain't kidding. All the explicit sexual scenes are cut (including the infamous tampon scene you may have heard about), there is zero nudity, and all the swear words are dubbed out.This is a very minimalist film about isolation, disconnection and unanswered questions. It will confuse & irritate anyone who is looking for a standard plot tied up with a pretty ribbon. Like the Brando film "Last Tango in Paris", it gives us the dysfunctional romance of two people who can't or won't share their past, who have no connection to the present and who haven't got any future. The only glue that holds them together is the house.The house, known as the "Rubber House" due to it's twisted black appearance, becomes the 3rd character in the story, like a voyeur but more than that--almost like an omniscient presence that observes everything but tells nothing. Again, this may frustrate the viewer who is looking for clearcut answers, but the poetry of the situation is far more important.There is also a lot of poetry in the dialogue, but you have to work very hard to catch the hints. There's a brilliant scene in a restaurant where the waiter (played by the unforgettable Issach de Bankole) describes a dish called "deconstructed jambalaya"--a recipe that consists of all the elements of jambalaya (a word that literally means "mishmash") but separated into its parts, not allowed to mix. The hilarious deadpan delivery of this speech along with Dafoe's reaction sums up the characters' relationship perfectly. In another cute piece of dialogue, Giada talks about how mathematicians never grow up because, living in an isolated world of abstract concepts, the never learn about the reality of life. This takes us back to the theme of disconnection and the timelessness of isolation which we feel in the Rubber House. The whole movie is very cryptically written, but if you pay attention to theme, not plot, it will make perfect sense.The key to enjoying this film is to imagine it's the first film ever made. Don't compare it to anything. Don't expect anything. There are no shootouts, car chases, criminal masterminds, Hollywood romances or melodramatic tear-jerkers. If you can somehow scrub those preconceptions out of your mind, I think you'll find that this movie is much closer to a real story than anything you've seen in the last 20 years. Whether that's entertaining or not is entirely up to you.
Alexander Miranda The only reason I watched the movie till the end was the "hope" to see something interesting. The movie is really bad and the performance of the girl it is really, really bad, honestly, I am not a movie critic neither an expert but you just need common sense to notice that this work it is incredibly bad.The first thing that came to my mind as soon as she started to talk was: "She has an affair with Willem Dafoe and he accepted to help her with the screenplay and appear in her movie since she is the brilliant director"... surprise, surprise, next day after I watched the film I found out on internet that Giada Colagrande is his wife. Awful story and terrible performance.
John Bosco Only one thing could have redeemed this sketch. A healthy gunfight between the happy couple, the exotic model at the delicatessen, and the old-timer from the motel who was (it would have turned out) secretly watching from the woods and had been aging rent-boy to the guys when they'd shared the rubber house. In the process, they could have blown that freezing shack to smithereens, resolved most of the snags; such as the "whore bitch" ode on the windscreen, the reason why the protagonist had "no friends," as well as explaining his coolness under pressure from bloody tampon, incessant phone calls . . . and that crawl-space chic, the green thumb, and his attraction to the simpler life. Quite the technician with the human body, though. Ex-abortionist? Morgue attendant? A bit of a heartbeat would have been nice.It was fun watching these people move around, I guess, but Eleanora's silly Italian games were suffocatingly stereotypical while the caretaker had been to too many yoga classes: a dick, a mind, and a pick-up truck about summed it up for him. I also wished they could have had a bit more luggage: Eleanora is ready to go after putting some black underwear into her nifty red suitcase and the caretaker just needs a cardboard carton there at the motel.Trifling matters, you may well say. I agree, although the niggling bits just didn't add up right in this rush job. Good owl-wrangling, though, and I really felt cold all the way through.
samholls I saw this movie in Venice Film Festival and I think it's a GREAT movie! It's funny and touching at the same time, full of tension and sexy, a little scary... and at the end I got really moved by it. It has a very original style and an awkwardness to it that makes it hard to define and to recognize. Most important, it stays with me still now, after two months since I saw it. But I can see why it's a movie that a lot of people don't get and won't like, it feels very intimate and intense, it makes you feel like an inappropriate voyeur... and that's something that most people don't want to deal with and get disturbed by (especially if there is sex involved). Also the fact that people know that Dafoe and Colagrande are a couple in real life (they wrote it together and they both act in it) I think might hurt the movie because people confuse what they see on screen with their real intimacy and get really embarrassed by it, they don't know how to deal with it and sometimes react really bad. I read a terrible review on Variety.com and was shocked of how stupid and mean it was, the reviewer didn't get it at all and seemed angry at the director for making the movie, which is a typical attitude of stupid and frustrated journalists 'wanna-be-directors' that I can't stand. But, as they say, the most interesting movies are always controversial and get the strongest reactions, in the good and the bad! So the fact that people either love it or hate it must be a good sign. Anyway I hope it gets released in the States so that you get a chance to see something really unique and judge yourself!