Outline for a proposed film : Dario - or The Mandrake Consignment

Martha Temmuz 09, 2021

Outline for a proposed film : Dario - or The Mandrake Consignment

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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16 July

Outline for a proposed film :
Dario - or The Mandrake Consignment

'Reap what ye shall sow'

For Rosy and Brent

1. Luigi Mandragora and Nancy Hope meet at a performance of Verdi's Otello, and, talking during the interval, become friends : she is in Verona for a year during her degree (Italian and French), and he is older, and did not go to university, but has already established himself in business, buying and selling rare recordings

2. They are close, but never lovers - something holds her off, even at romantic operas in The Arena, and she never quite trusts Maria Argenta, Luigi"s mother, who was widowed early, after the birth of his younger brother Dario (away, in London, at The Guildhall)

3. Nancy and Luigi write to each other when she returns to the family home in Suffolk (where she sings in a church choir), before completing her degree

4. Several years on, Luigi is visiting Dario in London (who chose to stay there, despite giving up on becoming a professional singer) and, to see Luigi again, Nancy (who has never met Dario) is invited to a party that he is throwing in Luigi's honour

5. Nancy works for a company in London that makes travel arrangements for musicians, and Dario works in music publishing

6. Unknown to her, Luigi and Maria (who is also visiting, but not in evidence at the party) contrive for Dario and her to meet (of which Dario is also unaware), and bewitch them both with love-potions

7. The effect is such that they abandon their wontedly cautious behaviour and disappear to the roof-garden, where they kiss and pet heavily, then return to the party separately

8. As the party continues, so does the effect of the love-philtres, and Dario (having told Luigi how struck he is on Nancy) manages to ask Nancy privately to stay the night, who, without her usual level of reserve, agrees

9. One of the last to leave, Luigi has seemed to slip out of the party and to have brought back a chilled bottle of a quality Italian sparkling wine for Dario (and Nancy), but, in fact, he gets the bottle from Maria, and lets her in (to hide in the roof-garden ?), when he returns, the bottle will knock Nancy and Dario out soon after they take it to bed, and, when Maria has seen that they are unconscious, she will let Luigi back in, who rapes Nancy to orgasm while she watches / listens next door, afterwards emptying away all but a small rresidue in each glass (and leaving the empty bottle as if the couple had consumed its contents)

10. FF through a montage or other telling of Dario being mortified that he does not remember the vigorous love-making, without protection, that proves to have made Nancy pregnant, and that, although she does not have any conscious memory of that first time, she seems never to find him or his love-making exciting, and yet they marry and stay together because of Lucia, with the distant attentions of her grandmother and apparent uncle, except for family visits

11. The suggestion that, although they are a couple out of duty, they do not even find themselves blessed by Lucia (or vice versa), and that, not just through teething, etc., they have never been able to rely on undisturbed sleep, and that they move to be near Nancy's parents to have their support with childcare and a detached property where tensions with neighbours no longer arise

12. Yet they repeatedly happen, when Lucia pesters and pesters to be allowed to play in the garden, but invariably wreaks destructive wonders on it, as soon as anyone's back is turned (which behaviourally mirrors their life with her in microcosm), so that Dario finally fences off the garden and gives Lucia her own patch of the garden near the house, where nothing that she plants is not soon uprooted or trampled on - until three seeds that are given to her by Nancy's old choir-master for Lucia's at Christmas, all of which, now oddly assiduous, feeds and waters into vigorous life, as ahe approaches her seventh birthday

13. Lucia's screams and rages at night have finally subsided, but Nancy and Dario, driven mad by a shrieking of unidentifiable origin at night, have resorted to heavy-duty ear-plugs at night, which means that they are unaware that, after arriving on an early flight, Maria and Luigi have been greeted by Lucia on her birthday and proudly shown her three established plants - which so repulse and horrify Maria, at some gut level, that she wrenches them out of the ground, unaware of their shrieks, and that first Luigi, and then Lucia, fall down dead behind her, and we see her, as if at the end of Mozart's Don Giovanni reached for by arms and pulled down, through the patch of soil, and into Hades

ENDS

© Copyright Belston Night Works 2020

However, Rosy [#UCFF's esteemed editor at TAKE ONE] then gave these notes... :

Gender flip all the characters and I’ll exec produce. And don’t come back to me with a Considine attitude.

[In obedience to which dictates [which assuredly reference #UCFF's Q&A comments on Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur (2011)], we then derived version 2.0...]

NB Now superseded by version 2.1 - fully corrected, and with preliminary ideas for casting

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)