Italian Film Festival in Sydney

ITALIAN Film Festival 2013.

The 2013 Italian movie event proved pretty lively, though my viewing may not be a good test. At twice Palace’s normal concession price, I became very selective.

The alarming thing is that after a few weeks in Italy itself,  picking through the stock in their neighborhood DVD stores, this was disturbing. Watching the Italian material the Australian National Weeks, art cinemas and SBS provide doesn’t mean we catch up the slack. Anyone in here is just falling further behind on both the historical material and new releases.

Of course we lose out on their great comics. Aldo, Giacomo and Giovanni or Leonardo Pieraccione have now joined Adriano Celantano and Lino Banfi on the “who?” list. The trio are five films ahead of me and Leonardo has brought out nine (!) since we last saw him on a local screen. However even the heavyweights, who used to be the backbone of festivals, are thinly represented. Pupi Avarti did get a showing with his so nice Il cuore grande delle ragazze a couple of years back but that’s the one of his last ten films to appear. Even the great Ettore Scola has a five film backlog.

On the other side, we get offered the amiable Alessandro Siani’s life’s work, including
another best friend spot in La Peggior Settimane della Ma Vita and his directorial debut,
the perverse Cinderella fantasy Il Principo Abusivo, which is better when Siani and
Christian De Sica do role reversal. The chancellor, showing our drop out hero court
etiquette, to make plausible his fake courtship of Princess and Gwyneth Paltrow lookalike
Sara Felberbaum, starts  getting training in the common touch from Alesandro.

The basis of selection for the current season defies any logic I can apply to it. La Grande
Bellezza from the Paolo Sorentino - Tony Sevillo combination, who did the accomplished
2008 Il divo: La spettacolare vita di Giulio Andreotti, has been singled out most places but proves to be a ponderous twenty first Century Dolce Vita, with a few startling moments spacing it’s 142 minutes. Sorentino’s musical interludes again get attention but do we need the rest? Couldn’t the imposing Servillo have been used on something better?

He was doing an Eduardo de Filippo play while I was in Verona. Only the language barrier kept me out.

The Festival’s Viaggo Solo/ A Five Star Life was a less engaged version of the kind of film they used to mount round Annie Giradot. In middle age, Margherita Buy is a commanding presence and her life as a “mystery guest”, doing accreditation reports for the hotels association, provides a chance for great international scenics (complete with superimposed temperature captions) and some convincing encounters with old flame Stefano Accorsi or her sister Fabrizia Sacchi and family. It all rounds out nicely in the meeting with Mike Leigh star TV guru Leslie Manville.

Particularly choice was Una Famiglia Perfetta/ Perfect Family an even better transcription of the 1996 Spanish Familia, with Sergio Castelitto making his own the Juan Luis Galiardo role, the patriarch who buys a (now Xmas) family gathering. Castelitto is in his element and the unfamiliar support, often with twenty years on their resumés, are spot on.

More challenging and grimmer was Gli Equilibristi /Balancing Act a convincing account

Gli equilibristi - Valerio Mastandrea & Anita B

of disgraced father Valerio Mastandrea’s attempt to meet his commitments, causing his decline into abject poverty, though he still has a job, car and cell ‘phone. Barbora
Bobulova and young Rosabell Laurenti Sellers register in an excellent cast.

Miele/ Honey is the first film as director of star Valerio Golino, who has been great in so
many US and Italian films. The

sparse, high seriousness impresses in this account of
assisted suicide. Jasmine Trinka scores as the anguished lead.

Masimiliano Bruno’s  Viva L’Italia was also a class act - political burlesque in the
manner of Moretti’s The Caiman, with a great cast. Michele Placido, a terrific performer
since the seventies, comes on as an opportunist politician, whose break down leaves him
incapable of his usual deceits. Rather than re-play Liar Liar or Nothing But the Truth, the
film centres on his family, represented by the star power of Alessandro Gassman, Raul
Bova and Ambra Anglioni, getting a great innings as a stuttering soapie star who had
parts because of her father. They manage the difficult shift from farce to rather winning
character comedy.

Throw in La Peggior Settimana della Mia Vita / The Worst Week of My Life, a nice
knockabout showcasing comedian Fabio de Luigi (also excellent in Masimo Vernier’s
Aspirante vedovo), where the star goes from calamity to disaster in the week before his
wedding to appealing Cristiana Capotondi. Chiara Francini gets a particularly good
innings as the co worker who claims to be carrying his baby two years after his night with
her. The ambivalent ending resonates.

Also saw the rather disappointing Ben Hur, centering on injured stunt man Nicola Pistoia,
reduced to posing for photos in a gladiator suit with tourists outside the Coliseum. It
might have been expected to echo Álex de la Iglesia’s great 800 Bullets which covered
the pasta western crews down to doing Almaria’s visitor show, but serves up something
much less involving.

I could probably have landed on the same number of  items of interest among the ones I
let go but that’s the penalty for getting all your Italian movies in one over priced season a
year. How nice it would have been to be able to recognise all the talent players, who front
these films. After this lot or items like Daniele Lucetti’s current Anni felici / Those Happy Years , you can’t but feel Italian movies deserve our attention more than the art house and multiplex films we are served.

Well, that’s what happens when heavies wipe out the National Film Theater and won’t
give it back for three decades.