ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2017  - Part 2.

 Opening night at the Italian Film Festival you scored Francesco Amato's Lasciati andare/Let Yourself Go which, like too many film festival selections, must have been chosen because it wouldn't scare away paying customers. This opened for an extended run the week after.

It is a conventional comedy where it’s a surprise to find current face of the Italian serious film Tony Servillo doing Woody Allen. He plays a Jewish psychoanalyst who is too mean to pay for a divorce from the appealing wife still doing his laundry and living in the next flat in the ghetto block where Tony is infuriated by the Observant neighbour who leaves the top floor lift door open on Sundays to avoid breaking shabbat.

 The patients from Tony's practice keep on turning up in the film’s plot developments. They include Giacomo, of the great Aldo, Giacomo and Giovanni team, who dates the wife and is more in his element.

Tony’s told by his doctor to get into shape or he’ll get diabetes, listing the consequences, and that bringing his mum’s exercise bike up from the cellar won’t help. He won’t stick with that the way he would with a gym membership. That’s using psychology on the shrink.

In the gym, Tony collides with sex pot Verónica Echegui running her jazzercise class in her spandex pants and when she hides from the owner’s jealous wife in the steam room with Tony, she convinces him he needs her as a personal trainer - predictable jokes about him running and working out with her as he gradually gets into shape.

Her whacked out sex life intrudes, with her black son setting fires, including one on Tony’s jacket. 
She is working Tony as part of the scheme where her psycho prisoner boyfriend Luca Marinelli wants to be hypnotised into remembering where he put the jewel store robbery loot. We've forgotten about him pacing out and burying this at the start of the film. When Tony finally gets him on the couch the piece moves deeper into knockabout. The session puts pistol waving side kick Vincenzo Nemolato to sleep and recovering the loot involves dropping an owl cage on the hapless Slav's head.

The handling is brisk and the bright colour scheme attractive. Mixing Jewish jokes, shrink jokes and slapstick crook comedy is occasionally amusing but we’ve been there before and might have hoped they’d come up with a more substantial vehicle for Servillo.

Simone Godano figured the personality swap idea could stand another go round as her first movie Moglie e marito/Wife & Husband. I wasn’t so sure. To start with macho Pierfrancesco Favino (Suburra) and elegant Kasia Smutniak (Perfetti Sconosciuti) seem unlikely contenders for a gender swap but that’s the thing that drives the film. Inner Favino having to come to terms with kissing outer Favino with three days growth of beard is in the same dodgy area as Hal Roach’s old Turnabout  but they embrace the possibilities and the leads enjoying making out is one of the funniest parts of the film.

Moglie e marito - Smutniak e Favino 

He’s a scientist trying to produce a machine which will transfer memories from one individual to another and she’s a sleek wannabe TV personality. Their marriage is on the rocks when his experiment swaps them over. There is the now familiar uneasy comedy of her acting butch and him fluttery but they do manage to get laughs out of inner Favino sitting with legs apart revealing his panties on her TV show and moving into startled Valerio Aprea’s flat while Kasia is outraged that he is putting junk food into her trim body and letting the baby breast feed after she had weaned it.

Best glossy European production values put the characters into plausible home, laboratory and TV industry settings. The piece gains a bit more traction when the pair have to use their old skill sets to sort out the problems they have caused but the ending when both have to articulate what they’ll miss if the transfer is reversed is actually quite touching.

Amori che non sanno stare al mondo/Stories of Love That Cannot Belong to This World is intensely female, like writer-director Francesca Comencini’s 2009 Lo Spazio bianco, so much so that a bloke viewer is likely to feel uncomfortably like an eavesdropper.

We kick off with thirties-ish Lucia Mascino waking up and immediately sending of needy texts to her ex-lover, who says he’d rather be put to the rack that resume their association. After chatting with her female neighbours, each with their own relationship dramas, needing a fifty Euro recharge for her smart ‘phone is a major crisis.

The film stays with the intensely irritating Mascino, pulling of the considerable feat of enlisting the audience to her point of view.

We see her as a disruptive speaker on a panel with white fleck bearded Professor Thomas Trabacchi. Her interruptions get her into his bed for a protracted relationship where they move in together. After make outs and inexplicable Black & white inserts, they reach the point where she wants to discuss feelings and he wants to rest up for the paper he has to complete the next day.  His lack of commitment (“I will not be prisoner of a dream I don’t share”) triggers their break up “Take a suitcase. It’s humiliating to be left by a man with a back pack.”

The separation is rough on Mascino despite the comforting of her friends and meetings in the university wash room where women compare experiences. However, Mascino finds consolation in an encounter with a glamorous pole dancer which comes with some striking naked lesbian love making.

Trabacchi meanwhile has paired with an appealing girl student who makes it clear she wants a ring on her finger. Trabacchi pictures Mascino criticing his conduct. News of the marriage gets back to Mascino who faints but rallies.

The former lovers later have a brief meeting and discuss the direction of their lives. We are given the impression that Mascino has the firmer grip on coming realities.

Some academic background, discussions of female orgasm and lots of skin pore close close-ups in wide screen are part of the film’s intense scrutiny. This one takes a lot of concentration. It’s not for everyone but I would imagine it will enthuse an audience that will identify with its female protagonist.

Daniele Vicari’s Sole, cuore, amore and Sergio Castellito’s Fortunata - a couple of  grim accounts of struggling working class mothers weren’t equal to their ambitions, though surprisingly Leonardi di Constanza’s L’intrusa without name stars and technicians covered the same area remarkably well. 

Fortunata : Trinka  

Director Sergio Castellitto was determined to jam everything into Fortunata - mother love, abusive husband, police brutality, kids’ birthday parties, Chairman Mao, drug use, burka women, racial slurs, loan sharks, a raunchy make out, a Chinese women’s synchronised tai chi routine in the rain and of course, being an Italian film, ‘vergogna’.

                                      

Castellito is an actor and his first loyalty is to his players who get to give bravura performances. Bleach-blonded Jasmine Trinca does the whole Anna Magnani thing as the beautician mother of young Nicole Centanni trying to keep custody despite the rough handling she gets from cop husband Edoardo Pesce. She also has to work it out with immigrant lover Tattooist Alessandro Borghi, who is helping build the salon where she can do heads without having to trundle all over the city.

Borghi’s life is further complicated by his dotty mother who no longer recognises him, a nice raddled turn by Hanna Schygulla. Her  presence prompts several nice visual touches. Borghi has the image of her, young and glamorous, inked on his shoulder and her floating umbrella is good movie short hand.  Some hope emerges when the child psychologist Centanni is referred to for spitting turns out to be simpatico Stefano Accorsi. His job is driving him spare. Accorsi's description of tracking down his deadbeat dad in Africa is one of the film’s highlights.

The film is effectively located in the urban fringe. Trinca trying to find a ‘phone booking on the outlying high rise intercom on the wrong side of the ring road gets asked if she gives massages.  The hairdressing salon with the blue neon sign reading “Lucky” is working it too hard however.

The film is a glum soaper not really lifted by its ambitions and strong cast. Castellitto’s best contribution to the Italian Film Festival has been showing up dubbed up in that nice Lavazza commercial. “In life there is always more to taste.”

Vicari’s 2012 Diaz - Don’t Clean Up This Blood! (title in English) is so imposing that I homed in on his new Sole, cuore, amore / Sun, Heart, Love with some enthusiasm. While it has strong characterisations, convincing locations in the Ostia region and the significant subject of the working poor, I came away disappointed.

The film is unrelievedly grim and it is undermined by the rather precious device of cross cutting Isabella Ragonese’s hard lot with the dance performances of her downstairs neighbour Eva Grieco, with their brass instrument accompaniment blaring on the track of both.

Ragonese is a mother of four who finds herself working as a waitress two hours away from her home, getting up at four thirty in the morning, catching an unreliable bus and train with the striking shot of the passengers finishing their trip on foot at dawn to make the point. She finds herself being docked by boss Marzio Romano Falcione for late arrivals. One of the film’s strengths is that both she and the film see his point of view, having hired her on the basis that she would work his seven day week and having to placate his dissatisfied ex cashier wife and expect the same standard of competence from his Arab student counter hand.  Husband Francesco Montanari looks after the kids and provides a spiff to smoke on the balcony of their sea on both sides flat but Ragonese is too exhausted to get involved in sex.

Sole, cuore, amore - Ragonese.

The pressure on Ragonese mounts plausibly but not all that involvingly, piling grief upon grief. Comes the finale and she’s been told to get medical treatment but finds herself sitting on the subway bench as her trains pull out. Throw in a lesbian shower scene and a little girl singing "Sole, cuore, amore" in the cafe.

On the other hand mature director Leonardo di Costanzo's L'intrusa/The Intruder is an agreeable surprise. It comes with a load of social indignation and is the kind of project subsidy hungry film makers turned out with infrequent success in the eighties.

 Di Costanzo had a career in documentaries, did an episode in a portmanteau film to which Jean Luc Goddard also contributed and has made one other dramatic feature. His script is co-authored with Bruno Oliviero, the director of Silvio Orlandi's 2012 La variabile umana. The approach here is to dispense with sculptured lighting and star performances in a subject that might have made a main stream dramatic feature.

Valentina Vannino, the wife of an arrested Camorra crime syndicate murder suspect, is given shelter in the hut on the scruffy suburban waste land that severe looking organiser Raffaella Giordano uses for a kids playground. She is setting up a Festa, one of the few activities which brighten the drab Neapolitan working class area. Music, a papier maché lizard and a ride on mechanical man made out of bike parts are in preparation.

The parents and school authorities object to Vannino who they associate with a brutal killing that has left one of the children mute after seeing her father beaten to death in front of her. Giordano protests that her project is "per tutti bambini" but there is an incident in which Vannino responds in character and the whole project is jeopardised.

Full of telling realistic detail - the bike repair shop guy who understands how to involve the withdrawn child, the visits of the Camorra wives, Vannino's second thoughts about make-up, the severed human hand that the kids spit at. The Festa makes a nice (ironic) climax. What might have been big dramatic scenes - finding the intruder in the locked kitchen, the meeting between the two little girls or the final understanding of the consequences are not shown. Instead we get loosely framed shots and subdued colour, not unlike news coverage. Mixing between source music and the play-out is about as interventionist as di Costanzo will go.  The staging with families overlooking the shared ground also sometimes resembles The Wire.

This one is well worth a viewing.

Giuseppe Piccioni penetrates the gumnut curtain more often than most Italian film makers and those movies have been consistently engaging - 1996’s Cuore al verde/Penniless Hearts, 2001’s Luce dei miei occhi/Light of My Eyes, 2004’s  La Vita che vorrei/The Life I Want  and 2009’s Giulia non esce la sera/Giulia Doesn't Date at Night.

His new Questi giorni / These Days is a departure from them. The only one of his regular performers to show is a now mature Margarita Buy who acquits herself impressively as a middle aged mother, becoming a hairdresser, her ambitions sacrificed to raise daughter Maria Roveran. She’s highly critical of her girl’s do.

The plot centers on four young women about to enter adult life. Roveran is diagnosed with a life threatening disease (excuse for one of the film’s boob shots). Orchestra violinist Caterina Le Caselle has become pregnant. Laura Adriani’s love life with Filippo Timi (La doppia ora) is stressful and dissatisfied Marta Gastini (also in Moglie e marito) has accepted a waitressing spot in Belgrade. The early stages of the film establishing the leads are uninvolving as the audience struggles to remember which back story goes with which unlined face.

However, when Gastini decides to drive to her new Serbian job, the others join her and the piece turns into an engaging Italian Road Trip movie. The girls with their pre-occupations and lack of experience become distinct characters. They encounter a group of English-speaking boys who take an interest, lending them a tent and taking them canoeing at the camp site. One tries to link up with Roveran - shot of him awkwardly sharing the back seat in the car. Gastini takes a dim view of that, sends him for coffee, dumps his back pack and drives off.

When they get to her drab looking Serbian destination they share the flat of her severe friend Mina Djukic, part of a group restoring a Belgrade cinema - which shows The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator over the dance floor. The backpacker is there and lets it be known that his experiences with the girls screwed up his vacation and he is looking elsewhere now - telling small scene.

Finally, a dash to the emergency room unites the friends in a way that makes the film rewarding. It has an uncharacteristic natural feel and reliance on close-ups of fresh featured young women which may (or may not) draw on improvisation

Effective desaturated scope images. The great Sergio Rubini (La bionda) is down to a walk-on.

 The political thriller is one of the best traditions in European film making - Cayatte’s Nous sommes tous des Assassins (France, 1952) Autant-Lara’s Tu ne tueras point (France, 1961), Costa Gavras’ Z (France, 1969), a whole swathe of the work of Gian-Maria Volonte, Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte  (Italy, 2003)  and Diaz, Don’t Clean Up This Blood.

For Annarita Zambrano to move into this company with her first feature Dopo la guerra/After the War (Italy, 2017) with a first time writer and featuring young Charlotte Cétaire in her debut role is a big ask and it’s impressive to see how far they get.

Dopo la guerra - Battison & Cétaire 

The opening is riveting, with a university professor leaving an angry 2002 student meeting, only to be gunned down. The assassin claims to be from The New Armed Faction for the Revolution, a long dormant Italian movement from the “Years of Lead” eighties political turmoil.

This impacts on Giuseppe Battison as one of the movement’s former leaders now sheltering in France under a Mitterand era amnesty. One of his fellow exiles has already been repatriated to face jail in his native Italy and Battison goes on the run, hiding out in a dilapidated Contis des Bains farm with his daughter Cétaire who was about to compete in her school sports contest and sit for her bac.

She sees her life destroyed, particularly when the striking Marilyne Canto arrives to do an interview, which will counter act a damning cover story in L’Express.  The journalist lets slip dad's plan to shift to Nicaragua.

Parallel with Battison’s flight, his sister, the still great looking Barbora Bobulova (impressive in Paolo Franchi’s La Spettatrice/The Spectator and Ferzan Ozpetek’s Cuore sacro/Sacred Heart) finds their association with a terrorist brother she hasn’t seen for twenty years jeopardises her position as a lecturer on the work of Dante, her husband’s election as chief magistrate and the safety of her mother Elisabetta Piccolomini through whose window a brick with the word “assassin” has been heaved. Bobulova discovers that her mother has been in secret contact, cherishing hidden photos of Cétaire.

The weight of the film falls on Battison whose character is given exceptional depth. He killed the judge who had condemned his associates in front of the man’s eight year old child only after he had seen his own brother shot down “sous mes yeux” by police after he had surrendered his weapon. He views the only outcome of his situation being the amnesty of his movement after their war - something the Italian government will never give. Battison has the telling story about meeting his former school mate while on the run and the man admiring his veins, having become a junkie, a casualty of a regime which would rather see his generation destroyed by dope than given responsibility.

Battison speaking French, (this is a French movie despite its Italian star, subject and place in an Italian Film Festival) is stretched to his limits. The amiable fat man comic of his earlier films did manage an effective serious part, dominating Paolo Genovese’s recent Perfetti sconosciuti/Perfect Strangers but this role would have challenged Volonte at his peak. The ending we are given fails to exploit the possibilities the film has established.

Zambrano’s handling is more at ease with film form, spacing the dialogue with effective locating footage - Bobulova in the street with graffiti like that of the opening, the glimpsed night time fair, Cétaire caressing the kittens in the barn or cycling through the striped shadows the line of trees throw on the road.

With its possibly inevitable shortcomings Doppo la guerra is still an imposing piece of work. It should be seen.

This makes a revealing comparison with Sidney Lumet’s dominant pre-occupation, the grown children of the second half Twentieth Century left. Think Daniel, Running on Empty or Garbo Talks or indeed Ricardo Darin in Kamchatka.

Fabio Grassadonia and  Antonio Piazza’s Sicilian Ghost Story is something new – a genuinely scary movie derived from the case history of a Mafia murder, filmed in an unfamiliar style that fluctuates between realism and fantasy. Romeo and Juliet get mixed in with Dante and a few more high culture references.  - sound like your total festival movie? Well it is but it overcomes that handicap.

We start with a scene of Sicilian school children on their way home with young Julia Jedlikowska following class mate Gaetano Fernandez off the path only to be attacked by a menacing dog whom he distracts with a half sandwich and his back pack. The two go off on the motor scooter he’s under the age to ride to see his steeplechase horse and they have their first kiss. In the background we spot a giant dam and a police car headed towards Fernandez’ house. The girl comes back after dark and Vincenzo Amato her father, while clearly angry, embraces her.

The boy vanishes from the classroom and everybody avoids the subject. There’s no sympathy in either house. The boy’s grand parents won’t talk to her and her mean Swiss mum spends her time in the house sauna and serving dad cold pasta meals from the fridge.

Turns out that Fernandez’ unseen father is a super grass and his former polizia associates have kidnapped his son to pressure him into silence. Both children lose their grip on reality under the pressure of his captivity and her efforts to find out where he’s being held. The film’s most striking innovation is a dream sequence that we assume is one character’s when it proves to be the other's.

Evidence of a decayed society is everywhere. The pet owl fed on the poisoned mice in the barn is one of the film’s nicest double duty bits of business. There are a couple of striking wide angle distorted tracking shots and it is all filmed in a disorienting style with cuts to objects too large in the frame, exaggerated sounds and confusing digressions. This contributes to the considerable suspense.

If the film has a fault, it is the clashing style of the sunny ending. Of the young players making their first film, friend Corinne Musallari sending coded messages by flashlight across the dark hillside village makes the most impression.

Feel good pieces don’t leave you feeling better than Gianluca Ansanelli's bright coloured scenics packed comedy Troppo Napoletano/From Naples With Love.

When his wedding singer dad is killed in a crowd surfing accident (they distracted the audience by announcing the prawn dish), troubled fat kid Gennaro Guazzo is assumed to have made a suicide attempt after school janitor finds him mounting the balcony.  Actually he was trying to get a better look at the girl classmate he has the hots for. Guazzo gets put into therapy with Dottore Luigi Esposito who explains that the kid’s entire extended family can’t attend the sessions. Mum, lush red head Serena Rossi, and an aunt clean his kitchen while he talks to the kid instead.

Troppo Napoletano - Rossi, Guazzo & Esposito

Bonding with Luigi over Papaya gelato, Guazzo tries to set the shrink up as a match for his widowed mother, sabotaging a succession of comic suitors. However, he finds that the object of his pubescent affections is the daughter of an ex-soap star whose drama class mum attends and who looks like pairing with her.

Determinedly Neapolitan, with Guazzo walking through the open air mercato with Rossi , taking the object of his affections on the tour of the church crypt and getting the animated history lesson about Greater Napoli. Lots of nice views of the Bay. The shot of the girl sitting alone on the beach is a great piece of movie punctuation.

Throw in a load of broad comedy and appealing characters, Guazzi’s fantasies (he pictures taking out a mortgage by plonking his piggy bank on the manager’s table), a couple of great musical numbers - Rossi doing her “La Spagnola” act that the neighbours crowd in to see - and the final Saturday Night Fever kids recital, and the fact that the film is a grotesque rendition of adolescence fades away.

Questione di Karma / It’s All About Karma looked a likely item coming from Edoardo Maria Falcone of 2015’s Se Dio Vuole/God Willing fame and featuring popular comic Fabio De Luigi (Il peggior settimana /Natale della mia vita and the Aspirante vedovo re-make) and Elio Germani an establish star (also in Ternderness) and it’s cast and presentation can’t be faulted. However all this production value is wrapped around a formulaic script played for predictable laughs.

We kick off with the heir to the coloured pencil factory idolising his dad who jumped out of the top storey window of their home. Grown to be bearded de Luigi who is on the point of having his inheritance taken away by his step father and sister Isabella Ragonese (transformed from Sole, cuore, amore). His Budhist studies send de Luigi off to meet reclusive author Phillipe Le Roy in his alpine retreat.  The sage is more interested in roast potatoes than enlightening our hero on re-incarnation.

Germano shows up as a conman who manages to convince de Luigi that he is his reborn father and in the usual feel good interaction the pair give each other’s lives a new impetus. It takes all the cast’s charm and the best technical finish to make this one go the distance. De Luigi’s transformation from earnest slacker to hard nosed business man is hard to take as a happy ending though the misleading climax of Germani’s plot is agreeable.

Massimiliano Bruno’s Ignorance is Bliss/Beata Ignoranza an attempt to recycle God Willing’s teaming of Marco Giallini and Alessandro Gassman, works out better, despite a change of direction half way through. We start off with teacher Giallini, who confiscates his kids' cell 'phones at the beginning of his lesson, discovering his old rival Gassman has been appointed to his school with a philosophy of ignoring paperwork because everything they need is on the Net. They nearly come to blows to the delight of their students whose video of the confrontation goes viral.

We've seen the menace of cell 'phones played out with Giallini before  in Perfetti sconosciuti.  Complications ensue when their shared daughter (yes, we remember Les Compères) arrives pregnant with her "quirky" film crew to have them filmed switching their approaches for her TV documentary. This element gets lost as we explore the leads' character shortcomings - particularly in their dealings with women. The appealing Valeria Bilello is particularly badly used.

  

There are a few attempts to open up the form, as with the early scenes of turning to the audience or Carolina Crescentini's answering back from the mortuary photo, but mainly the piece coasts on the opposition of the two leads backed by skilled players and brisk film making.

Silvio Soldini has been off our radar most of the time since his 2007 Giorni e nuvole / Days and Clouds and we’ve seen regrettably little of his star, the immensely appealing Valeria Golino  - Rain Man 1988, Giulia non esce la sera / Giulia Doesn't Date at Night 2009 among some remarkable items.

Questione di Karma : Germano & de Luigi at Trevi Fountain

Signora Golino is in top form in the new Il colore nascosto delle cose / Emma playing a blind osteopath crossing the path of  Adriano Giannini, who we know is going to be a soul-less user because we see him working in advertising. Sure enough he is making it with someone else’s wife who immediately unwraps and tells him there will be consequences if he answers his cell ‘phone, as well as fetching blonde Anna Ferzetti, a fiancée he has to keep stalling when he starts moving on Valeria after he sees her buying that bright red outfit. She has developed the ability to smell colours and a couple of other skills he and the audience find puzzling. 

Il colore nascosto delle cose :Giannini & Golino

Of course it all unravels, here in a surprise meeting with Ferzetti in a supermarket where the low life Giannini leaves Golino lost in shallow focus bright lights, passing her off as “A poor blind lady” he’s helping. There’s some by play with the family the low life  didn’t visit when his step father died in the provinces. Both Golino and Giannini get to fill in their characters with involving back stories. For most of the running time this has been a maybe but Soldini manages a final twist which tips the scales in it’s favour.

The film making is unremarkable. It has one curious feature. Now that digital has made it easy, the shape - well size here - of the image keeps on changing, not dictated by obvious thematic (I Am Not Madam Bovary) or aesthetic (Grand Budapest Hotel) choices.

And for the record, I encountered more soulless activity in feature film making than in advertising.

There’s something odd happening with Gabriele Muccino’s  L'estate addosso / Summertime. It’s two years old and the coverage seems to be in Italian which is odd for a film made largely in English. IMDB gives the American support players (Laura Cayouette memorable in Django Unchained and Scott Bakula!) top billing. The copy arrived here without sub-titles, making key passages frustrating, and Palace did not feel they should cut their premium prices for the showing.

Muccino at work with Lutz, Frey, Haro and Pacitto.

 

 

 

 

 

The film itself  is disturbingly uneven. Muccino’s been off making Will Smith movies in the ‘States and while Pursuit of Happyness and Seven Pounds are not disgraceful they don’t seem to have helped either man’s careers. Summertime opens with a downwards shot of Roman teenager Brando Pacitto (chiefly notable for playing Jesus on TV) stretched out on the grass possibly deliberately invoking Boyhood and his English language narration provides our old friend alienation. “Days with my friends were all the same.” He completes his finals but is involved in a traffic accent which leaves him battered but the recipient of a compensation cheque and his pot smoking vulcanologist chum Guglielmo Poggi urges him to take a holiday in the ‘States.

Some how he finds Matilda Lutz the girl nobody likes at school coming along too. They call her “the Nun” because she won’t drink, have sex or do dope with them. So far so so.

The pair arrive in San Francisco where accommodation has been set up in a flat occupied by gay couple Taylor Frey and Joseph Haro. She thinks of them as degenerates. Well we know where this is going. Sure enough it becomes a plea for understanding and tolerance. This might be new and needful to some audiences but hardly for people who will turn out for a Muccino film with sub-titles - let alone missing subtitles.

However something exceptional does happen. Going around together in San Francisco, to which the boys arrived in the same way our travellers did from a repressive background, the newcomers lose their restraint. We get Frey’s back story which is presented as sensational. Haro takes them riding, cementing his desire to be with the horses. The boys’ dog sleeping in his bed drives Pacitto into sharing with Lutz’. She finds herself getting about (somewhat nervously) in an itsy bitsy bikini and they hit the gay clubs together - half naked baby oiled bodies.

The film becomes one of Muccino’s lyrical hymns to the group. The stop over stretches and they all go off on a trip to Cuba together (this one is into international flights) which actually convinces us that they are sharing an experience that they all will cherish all their lives.

This section is totally winning and it’s a pity that the film can’t do anything with the impetus it produces. Having the piece narrated by Pacitto, it’s least interesting character, doesn’t help either. Matilda Lutz’ transformation is truly awesome and we can only hope she gets to do that in a few more movies, while Haro and particularly Frey along with the travel footage come across effectively.

It seems that this one is already in there with Bix, Intersections and Jimmy P. as failed European attempts to crash the English language market. At least they are all better than Rossellini’s Ingrid Bergman films. I guess that’s some kind of progress.

I enjoyed this event. It became one of the highlights of my year's viewing. I like to think I’ve kept an eye on Italian films down the years - art house, ethnic cinemas and VHS, SBS, their film weeks and even a few excursions into the home ground. Some of those IMDB entries have only my comments. However when I start checking out the credits of  films like Tenderness' accomplished personnel I become aware of how fragmentary my access to this work has been. That’s something I regret and short of leaving the country for somewhere with a functioning Cinémathèque there's nothing I can do about it. Too bad.

 

Barrie Pattison 2017

ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Another Italian Film Festival. This one had the usual down side of these National Events - ticket prices the size of the Hawaiian national debt and getting an indigestible year’s supply of one country’s film force fed in one brief period. The Spaniards set the bar high this year and thirty offerings from their Mediterranean neighbours could have been an anti climax - an oversize order of movie pasta or a child's portion of the Euro feast we don't get invited to?

However I’d been out of the country while the last couple were running and I started finding unexpected advantages. Repeat appearances meant recognising their stars and featured players. I even began to resurrect my near to forgotten Italian.

Regional differences register more striking than those in work from other countries. Naples got a really good work out. The picturesque  streets young Gennaro Guazzi shows the girl class mate he hankers for in Troppo Napolitano are  barely recognisable as those where two and three wheel traffic jostles elderly Renato Capentier in Tenderezza. Elio Germano observes that you have to be born there to appreciate the city. The event threw up a portrait of  Italy itself, the contemporary subjects, showing the country struggling with recession, echoed stories from earlier periods.  Norman Lewis’ autobiography turned into the compilation documentary Napoli ‘44  ends with the population of the devastated WW2 city rewarded with a democracy which permits them to chose leaders among the powerful men they know to be corrupt. Also WW2 set In guerra per amore shows Sicily where a mafioso mayor proudly declaims that they have outlasted conquerors and governments. It matches alarmingly  with the present day set L’ora legale.  L’estate addosso spells it out. Their American hosts express admiration for the country and the Italians say that yes but they do have corruption, environmental outrages and Mafia - curiously the problems current Chinese films describe.

Of course there is no guarantee that a country’s cinema represent it accurately and a thirty film event may not even represent it’s movies. We didn’t score any gentlemen in frock coats promoting Garibaldi to the strains of Giuseppe Verdi or slashers in party masks preying on the runway girls.  Promising new titles didn’t make the cut - Marco Tullio Giordana’s Two Soldiers, Paolo Virzi’s La pazza gioia, Davide Barletti and Lorenzo Conte’s La guerra dei cafoni, Giuseppe Tornatore’s La corrispondenza, Alessandro Aronadio’s Orecchie and Marco Bellocchio’s Fai bei sogni. Pupi Avati has been out of contention making television and Gabriele Salvatores' The Invisible Boy is still finalising.

Heading up the charge as predicted, Gianni Amelio’s impressive Tenerezza: Holding Hands / Tenderness must be rated among the best films of the moment.

With a  body of work that includes Porte Aperte and Lamerica, two of the most imposing European films of the last decades, Amelio was going to be the front runner. This one is not a big statement like those. It’s a careful account of the life of retired Neapolitan lawyer Amelio regular support player Renato Carpentieri, first found faking unconsciousness in hospital with daughter Giovanna Mezzogiorno in attendance. Once she leaves, he pulls out his drips and goes off.

Renato Capentier & Elo Germano Tenerezza

He makes his way back to his third floor courtyard apartment only to find neighbour Micaela Ramazzotti (Anni Felici) locked out on the stairs. Letting her into her area, which was once part of his flat, starts off the business of him being drawn into the life of her family, husband Elio Germano (La nostra vita) and the two children who use the shared courtyard to investigate his home.

With a  body of work that includes Porte Aperte and Lamerica, two of the most imposing
European films of the last decades, Amelio was going to be the front runner. This one is not a big statement like those. It’s a careful account of the life of retired Neapolitan lawyer Amelio regular support player Renato Carpentieri, first found faking unconsciousness in hospital with daughter Giovanna Mezzogiorno in attendance. Once she leaves, he pulls out his drips and goes off.

He makes his way back to his third floor courtyard apartment only to find neighbour the appealing Micaela Ramazzotti locked out on the stairs. Letting her into her area, which was once part of his flat, starts off the business of him being drawn into the life of her family, husband Elio Germano and the two children who use the shared courtyard to investigate his home.

The film has been running an hour before it really takes shape but this holds attention  as much as the shock turn of events that fills up the courtyard with spinning blue light Polizia vans and ambulances. Devastated Carpentieri attempts to intervene. Greta Scacchi’s brief appearance kicks off with a total shock and shows the actress totally on top of her material, making a key contribution.

This one works on the opposite proposition to most screen writing. They don’t work up your sympathy for the characters by having people say how much they admire them. The Carabiniere and the hospital orderly knew Carpentieri in his ambulance chasing days and are contemptuous. Mezzogiorno asks whether he was honest and his law clerk tells her “It’s hard to be a good lawyer and honest too.” His former mistress holds a grudge against him and his son is more interested in helping himself to the currency notes the old man hides around the flat in books than in his problems. Mezzogiorno’s own child doesn’t much like her and the first time we see her at work she’s ratting out the Arab prisoner in the glassed in court room dock she’s translating for.

 Tenerezza : Carpenteri, Amelio & Ramagozzi 

By the time we get to the end of the film we know a lot more about her because we understand - and like - him. That’s an impressive achievement.

The film making is exemplary. The camerawork is Luca Bigazzi in top form and accordingly exceptional. Editor Simona Paggi is a front runner too with the film’s ellipses
striking - the outcome of Germani’s meeting with the peddler whose scene has been filmed disturbingly too close in a film where the placement of camera has been exemplary or the discovery of the toy fire engine. Sound recording, normally a given, achieves distinction establishing the atmosphere of the roofed open space galleria or the busy streets in a way which cements conviction.

It’s rare to find a film with such a complex argument that holds attention for two hours and avoids all the pitfalls of sentiment - and cynicism. I would class this one as must see.

Interestingly what is basically a relationships piece is one of the few films in the event to treat the problem of immigrants, though Sole, cuore, amore does have a nice exchange with Isabella Ragonese who is surprised that her ethnic offsider enjoys male pin ups and is told “There are a billion Arabs don’t expect them all to be idiots.”

Recycled comedy formulas dominated the comedy entries. Having Massimo Gaudioso’s Un paese quasi perfetto / Almost Perfect Town shift Jean-François Pouliot’s 2003 Canadian La grande séduction / Seducing Dr. Lewis  to Pietramezzana, a poor village in the Lucan Dolomites, emphasises their resemblance to Benvenuti Al Sud  (2010) and Reality (2012) both written by Gaudioso and pivoting on an orchestrated fantasy that gets out of hand.

I found the basic deception off-putting at first but the skilled comic performances and affectionately handled characters win out. Silvio Orlandi (The Young Pope) is punching below his weight here but he shows his skill in making endearing the desperation he brings to the mad scheme to attract a company to the town where the out of work mining community now exists on unemployment pay-outs and his roof leaks, despite his collecting a second dole for a dead associate.

The plan to recruit city plastic surgeon Fabio Volo (hijacked to avoid a dope conviction for his lady friend pulled over by one of the town’s former citizens now a traffic cop) consists of a succession of  frauds of varying ingenuity and comic appeal - faking a local cricket team though he can’t account for both teams cheering at the end of the season (“They’re very sporting”) and  they switch the TV to the soccer the moment the leaves the bar, dropping bank notes in the streets near  bicycle, having the town’s one restaurant serve sushi and inventing a lost offspring for Orlandi that the orphan doctor can relate to.
His conversations are monitored on the old mine switchboard with the listeners wondering about all the train innuendo.

There is even a quite touching scene where the aged patient sleeps clutching Volo’s hand.

The way the situation is turned round for the finale is more inventive and more winning than the earlier film and this one does work in making the community the focus for our sympathy. They make an interesting contrast to the conniving Sicilians in L’Ora Legale  It’s The Law. Both films deploy A feature talent on a low comedy subject though their aims are opposite.

l'ora legale : Ficarra & Picone

L'ora legale / It’s the Law comes from the comedian team Ficarra & Picone and also relates to the other comic films in the event. It shows Pietrammare, a fictitious coastal town in Sicily, actually filmed in Palermo’s Termini Imerese where Cinema Paradiso was shot.

We kick off with local priest  Leo Gullotta muttering when he stands in doggy do on the
picturesque stone steps. The streets are full of uncontrolled traffic and the town’s rough
neck is collecting a fee for watching the vehicles parking illegally in the square where the church dwarfs the town hall. Corrupt mayor, the imposing Tony Sperandeo is pork barrelling his way to re-election. The mourners in a funeral procession each carry one of his white plastic bags of gift groceries.

His only opposition is school teacher Vincenzo Amato (also in Boarwalk Empire and  Sicilian Ghost Story) running on a clean government platform. One of the comic leads runs a speaker van supporting him while the other one drives one supporting Sperandeo. They are both members of the same extended family which provides would-be comic family meals. There is however an upset and the Polizia financiale take away Sperandeo handing the election to Amato. Nice scene of him saying good bye to his pupils.

This is initially a cause of rejoicing but Amato’s office fills with a line of petitioners who find that the network of perks that sustains them has unravelled. The Padre’s Bed and Breakfast has to pay tax, the police have to write up fines on their neighbours for the first time in thirty years and the civil servants have to actually spend time at their desks ruining the cafes where they used to pass their day. Even the forest rangers have to go out into the woods.

There are some dire routines with the leads incriminating one another by putting recyclables in the wrong bins at night and making animal noises to account for the noise they make. The outraged citizens call a town meeting in the church, where the woman who made a point of keeping one of  Amato’s election leaflets to reproach him for unkept promises, produces it to list the reforms he has actually enacted. Only one man speaks out saying how much more agreeable the ordered streets have become and they turn on him.

Amato’s sister finds the shops will no longer serve her and her job at the factory whose poisonous effluent has pushed up the town’s death rate is closed for not meeting environmental standards. Her co workers won’t speak to her. The citizens determine to act against the reformer.

The job of intimidating Amato falls to the dire duo who we find in a Dexter style plastic covered room with a chain saw to cut the head off a horse to leave in his bed. They can’t bring themselves to do that or behead a goat or a bunny and the wives complain about the zoo accumulating in their front gardens, so the boys use the head of a sword fish  (an expensive buy) and Amato turns it into pasta sauce. They build an unauthorised extension with the materials from the fake Greek Gazebo they couldn’t get a permit for and a bit of probing finally exposes Amato’s weakness.

The mob forms in the square demanding his resignation with a choreographed Mexican wave. However the boys riding double on the horse have retrieved his daughter who makes a stirring speech on the steps of the Municipo with Amato coming out and adding his own convincing appeal.

The mob turn on them savagely. Sperandeo is restored to the delight of all.

This is not the outcome we expected for this piece of knockabout and the point is made in a coda with the one supporter bound in a chair facing Alessandro Roja who is clearly meant to be a Mafia enforcer though they call him a Roman politician. He explains he’s not a bad person.

As for Ficarra & Picone, they clearly consider themselves as an extension of the tradition of Sicilian low comics Franco and Ciccio and of Aldo, Giacomo and Giovanni who they supported in the 2000 Chiedimi se sono felice. The duo appears to stand out from that line however, avoiding nudity and bad language and in this film it’s possible to see the childish quality which throws into relief the bitter after taste material which is the dominant feature. They appear to go down a treat in their home market, as shown by the large returns on this film. I just wish they were funnier.


I did look forward to a second helping with Smetto quando voglio: Masterclass/I can Quit Whenever I Want to : Masterclass. The sequel is again scripted and directed by Sydney Sibilia and turned out to be more of the same, here keeping on promising better than it delivers.

We pick up Edoardo Leo’s Chemistry Prof. Zinni in the clink where we left him at the end of part one. (His advocate was a specialist in Canonical Law). Leo's league of redundant university lecturers had been caught after they went Walter White and started supplying the drug market. It's the same gag of mixing the academics in with cops and pushers, done in the same Fluoro palette

Leo's menaced by an inmate with a safety razor blade that he doesn’t think was sterilised. However ambitious cop Greta Scarano, hard to recognise as a short haired brunette after her turn as the imperilled blonde in Suburra. She registers in all the confusion. She followed their case (cuttings on a wall and a few superimposed images), offers to let Leo out as required, so he can be with wife Valeria Solarino when their child is born. Scarano wants Leo to track down more of the drugs that have yet to be criminalised pouring into the market.

Smetto quando voglio ; Scarano and Leo

With an “eighteen months before” title we get the story of their fat analyst, hooked on their in-house product and turning over his truck on a ramp, when he was high on his half kilo stock of still legal pills. He was startled to see his department’s chromatograph being
trucked away. As before, his is the film's most rewarding character, detoxing in therapy with the priest who he tells has the composition of modelling clay wrong. Our man is
desperate to get away from the room full the plaster Madonnas he has to sculpt.

The other members are under-written, throwing the effort back on the performers to register. They get a bit of action out of the antiquarian, the only one still a functioning academic. This is picked up again in the chase where their van, with their physicist's after burner, destroys the Hadrian’s Market ruins.

There’s an excursion to the East where the Theoretical Anatomist is going Deer Hunter (he gets decked before he starts) and Lagos where another team member is trying to sell suitcase bombs useful for blowing up schools. That doesn’t go too well either.

Identifying ingredients like puffer fish venom means they manage to close a range of drug labs. However, their detoxed analyst finally succumbs to the allure of the red tablets which the cops are particularly keen to eliminate - Richard Linklater type rotoscope animated sequence.

Scarano, with a girl investigative reporter and her boss both on her ass, has to renege on their deal unless they can crack the red tablet guys and the clue of the chromatograph has them following a shipping container full of the birth control pills that the peddlers are using as an ingredient.

The piece finally comes into its own with another one of those moving train climaxes like the one in the Jacky Chan Railway Tigers. Here Leo's team have to keep up with the container, in which one of their number has been locked, while they ride museum Third Reich vehicles and wear authentic Nazi helmets.

This manages to mix gags and action a treat “We’ve just killed the foremost Latinist in Europe” sets up one of the film’s best moments.

When it looks like we’re heading for a happy end there’s the double down turn in their fortunes complete with Luigi Lo Cascio appearing to anticipate his number in the promised part three. This seems to be pushing their luck. They've had trouble making a second outing go the distance.

There is also Non c'è più religione/Messy Christmas where director Luca Miniero and stars Claudio Bisio & Angela Finocchiaro had done pretty well out of Benvenuti al sud/Welcome to the South running to a sequel and  a French version with Danny Boon, so they decided to give the handle another turn. This time it's Bisio as the mayor of the remote Mediterranean Island of Portobuillo to which he has returned after some kind of a failure in the big time in Brussels.

They have a problem. The declining population means that the youngest inhabitant in the declining community is a chubby kid grown to the point where he crushes the nativity pageant crib at the rehearsal. Without the pageant the needed tourists won’t be interested and the place will decline even further and nobody fancies the idea of the standard issue plastic baby Jesus. So Bisio determines that he will recruit a baby from the adjacent community of “crab eater” Muslims, over the objections of the church congregation he keeps on interrupting.

 Non c'è più religione Bisio, Grazia Daddario, Gassman

Things get more complicated when he and resident nun Finocchiaro have to deal with barely recognisable Alessandro Gassman, with whom they used to be á trois (before Angela took her vows of course). Alessandro is now a Muslim convert in a scratchy false beard, leading to a swathe of cultural divergency jokes. “Don’t admire anything in their home or they’ll feel obligated to give it to you.” the baby deal requires the islanders to observe Ramadan.

 This is all backed by attractive Mediterranean scenery and a great comic cast. It sounds like lively and edgy fun and for a while it is but they can’t keep up the momentum. The routines become strained - simultaneous services in the shared church or the bishop, an aged Roberto Herlitzka no less, desperately making excuses for the irregularities in the Nativity scene finally defeated when they ring in a Llama because they can’t find an Ox. The Muslim kids, seeing his robes decide he’s Santa Claus, foreshadowing the films nicest gag where they break out in “Santa Claus is coming to Town” with belly dancer choreography.

The personal material is better with Bisio, Finocchiaro and Gassman recalling their time together and Bisio’s teen age daughter Laura Adriani leaving Muslim boy Mehdi Meskar who holds up a farewell placard as her ferry pulls out. This all gets buried in the farcical complications.

By the time we get to a Ganesh statue in the dinghy, and the baby’s delivery, attention is wandering.

In fact the recession appears to be reviving Sicilian organised crime to the despair of  reformers and there is more serious comment in this film than seemed to be the case. The point is curiously underlined when we remember Sicilian actor Sperandeo’s turn as the Mafia Don making the highlight actual “Hundred Steps” speech in Giordano’s exceptional Cento Passi of 2000.

Pif was an assistant on that one. He’s in charge of  another Sicilian subject In guerra per amore/At War for Love in this season. 

In Italian studio New York, stuttering, plate dropping waiter Pif and boss’ niece Miriam Leone (also in Un paese quasi perfetto) in the full forties Technicolor lips and banked hair, are an item. He takes a fuzzy proto selfie under the Brooklyn (?) Bridge. This doesn’t go down well with her mobbed up family who have arranged a marriage with made man Lorenzo Patané. Meanwhile the authorities have made a deal with Lucky Luciano to have their arrival in Sicile opposition free - as in Francesco Rosi’s 1973 Luciano film.

In guerra per amore ; Pif & Leone

The only way to override Family authority it to get the permission of her dad in Sicily but the US is in WW2,  so our hero in one of the film’s stretches of logic signs up with the invasion force and gets put in charge of the ship board donkeys.

In occupied coastal Cristofullo the locals have an early warning system which consists of
the grubby duo positioning it’s blind member so that he hears the planes coming. The old
man who prays to a wax model Mussolini and the granny who prays to a plaster virgin
compete to get to the bomb shelter cellar where the locals gather. The blind man detects a sound coming from all sides. It’s the allied landing. 

This is staged with a half hearted attempt at scale and when the troops advance they are met by the local comic Don who persuades the Italian soldiers to surrender their weapons. Rejoicing in the streets.

Pif is helicoptered (!) in on a donkey and landed in the unmarried girl’s (what happens to her) bedroom with the animal,  with instructions to rescue captured Lt. Andrea Di Stefano and ends up chained up with him at shotgun point, forging a bond. He also gets sent with the message from the stateside Don which asks the local mob to off Pif,  himself then downing the house liqueur though he doesn’t drink.

Scenes of  the Americans administering the place which consists of  releasing the mob nominated list of “prominent anti fascists” from jail including triple murderers - “pardoned by the allied government.”  It looks as if the comic duo who were caught trying to steal a hanged American’s boots will be done for looting but Pif mistranslates their incompetent protests and earns their gratitude by getting them out.

None of this is as funny as it might be.

The comics locate Leone‘s father whose relatives are gathered for his passing and Pif in Di Stefano’s jacket (impersonating an officer!) puts his case to him despite the old man being committed to Patané, finally winning him over with the fuzzy photo. However Di Stefano disturbed by the alliance with the Mafia has prepared a report to be sent to FDR. He is offed by mistake by the mob hit man sent to get Pif.

Implausibly our hero is freighted back to the US to get married with Di Stefano’s report which he refuses to surrender to the sentry at the White House. Leone, who has been stalling, escapes the engagement party and joins him on the bench outside the white house - a great image.

The Sicilian setting and structure of  placing the knockabout material against the sinister historical events recalls Pif’s 2013 La mafia uccide solo d'estate/ The Mafia Only Kills in Summer and has been compared to Forrest Gump. The film’s romantic and comic material is ham fisted but notes of reality kick the piece into life - surrendering Italian soldiers emerge with their hands behind their heads to see with distaste the locals embracing the yanks in return for cans and chocolate bars, the truck emptying of returned prisoners leaves the little boy finding his father is not among them, the mistake mob murder. The declaration of love by the comic tramp is dismissed by the object of his affections who wouldn’t want the community to think they were “fruits.” As in L’ore legale/I It’s the Law there is no priest - only the bombed religious granny.

It makes an interesting comparison with Norman Lewis’ diary-become-book of his war time with the US forces in Italy Naples ‘44 . This one is much admired and it’s not hard to see why. The thing which gives its impact is Benedict Cumberbach’s reading of narration drawn from it. Whether Francesco Patierno’s film does the original justice is speculative. It follows the form of his  2012 La guerra dei vulcani tracing the Magnani - Rossellini - Ingrid Bergman affair mixing actuality and fiction material.

The lab work is disappointingly uneven, some of it approaching original negative quality and some looking like it was lifted off a VHS tape found on someone’s mantle shelf. Catch 22 scores best (Alan Arkin gets a thanku in the end roller) with them curiously using only material from the segments derived from Paisa and not in the original book. Paisa itself shows up along with  Duilio Coletti’s Il re di Poggioreale /Black City with Ernie Borgnine and Keenan Wynn, Nani Loy’s 4 Days of Naples of course and  Toto in Sergio Corbucci’s 1963 Gli onorevoli and a killer clip from Liliana Cavani’s 1981 La Pelle with Marcello Mastroianni re-arranging the bones in the unspecified restaurant meat meal into a human hand.

Whether trying to identify these distracts or enhances the narrated material is speculative. Lewis’ take on events is both funny and appalling - selected because the military police considered blue eyed people trustworthy, he is sent off to join the American forces with a Wembley pistol and five rounds to face enemy tanks on a front where the US officers have deserted their men. He gets to be stationed in a palace in a Naples without water or power, where the Germans set one enormous mine blast and are rumoured to have laid another which will explode when the power is restored - actuality of the city being evacuated. Lewis is confronted by a succession of genteel law school graduates who have
never pleaded a case their business cards reading avocado, dottore or volunteering professore to be selected as police informers. Cans of food are distributed and in a nearby room women with small piles of the tins, offer to provide sex for another one. The estimate is that one in four of the city’s eligible females are whoring. The increase in vice matches the decline in edible cats. The locals strip tanks for saleable elements. The blood of Saint Genaro looks like it will not liquefy indicating the loss of the Saint’s protection. Vesuvius erupts.

Lewis considers that the citizens of Naples must long for the days of Mussolini. Despite the movie referencing, this is all material we are not used to seeing in films. It is disturbingly funny and sobering at the same time.




Part two of this report follows.

Three for WINGS.

I WANTED WINGS.

I’ve thought of William Wellman’s 1927 Wings as one of the all time best films since I first saw it fifty years back so I came at the showings of the 2012 restoration nervously. I needn’t have worried. I was damp eyed by the time they got to the fourth of the Paramount mountains in the prologue.

With this film, director Wellman imposed himself on a project which dwarfed the production line movies he had done before. Though he didn’t originate Wings, once selected for his WW1 aviator background, he dominated the end result. This was a film that he was still proud of at the end of his career, after he had put together  four decades of masterpieces spaced with engaging programmers - Beggars of Life, So Big, The Public Enemy, Wild Boys of the Road, College Coach, Central Airport, The Hatchet Man, Heroes for Sale, A Star Is Born, Beau Geste, Nothing Sacred,  The Oxbow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe, Yellow Sky, Across the Wide Missouri and Island In the Sky (you decide which are which) - along with his share of  clunkers. This is well on the way to being the most impressive output of any film maker.

Wellman orchestrated the script’s dramatic rise and fall - small town America, training, first combat flights (interval) the frantic Paris break, the drama of “the Big Push” and a return to home. 

Wings - Shooting Star

 We open with kids next door Charles Buddy Rogers (who they don’t show in the new trailer!) modifying his factory car for speed to the admiration of Clara Bow, at twenty five already showing traces of her hard life but still managing irresistibly bubbly. Her kicking her heels on the lawn is the business they steal for Anne Baxter’s 1949 silent movie simulation in You’re My Everything. However Charles Buddy only has eyes for Jobyna Ralston (with Harold Lloyd in his best features) who in turn is an item with well to do Richard Arlen, busily  pushing her swing with  the camera mounted on it as it reveals Buddy arriving to take Jobyna for a spin.

Comes the nation’s call and the boys sign up along with El Brendel for pilot training of which we get some effective documentation - throwing up after being in the rotating gimbals, physical jerks, boxing  and the rest. The boys are shipped out for flight training which darkens the tone of the piece effectively.

When we get to Europe and the first dawn patrol, the dog fight, the piece of course comes into it’s own with the Gotha bomber attacking Mervale - great shot from above of it and it’s two escort planes taking off in the dust. All the high tech. effects work which would be used on this material later can’t match the excitement of real planes actually in the air together. That first genuine bi-plane crash is still breath catching

We hear about Kellerman / the Von Richthofen character’s chivalry in not bringing down a flyer whose machine gun had jammed but that doesn’t extend to not shooting up (not all that convincingly) downed pilots.

The interval is part of the structure with the film resuming with a change of tone which would have been disturbing butted straight on. My rough timing corresponded to the 141 minutes the restoration is supposed to clock in at and it is running marginally fast - the aerial footage was deliberately undercranked. I don’t recall the scene of snatching the white parasol in front of the Arc de Triomphe in earlier versions. This looked like a complete copy and we were so lucky to get it. A repeating feature of screenings is people saying they had no idea how long the film had taken to watch.

Wings - Marchal, Rogers and bubbles

The Paris material kicks off with that tracking shot through the cafe couples - one of which is lesbian - that makes it into all the compilations and gets A.E.F. girl Clara back into the action, momentarily topless. The different reactions of the military police duo come for Buddy are a treat. Back under canvas, there’s the misunderstanding over Jobyna’s inscribed photo and more aviation action, with the hokey dramatic climax. By this time they could have had Dick and Buddy as space men trying to go home and I would have still accepted it.

The film craft is kicking in. The Shooting Star on Buddy’s car and plane give impact to the Iron Cross symbol on the German fighter. The officer kissing the cheeks of the heroes he’s giving medals sets up what is incorrectly called the first male on male kiss in movies, with peasant woman Margery Chapin’s reaction cut in to take the curse off it. Add in the propeller coming to a stop.

Find another bromance that is so explicit and so effective in movies. Wellman enjoyed pushing this to the edge of the homoerotic line without falling over. It’s much more compelling than covert gay relationships in the films of Tay Garnet (Slightly Honourable, The Big Haircut / Wild Harvest) or Sam Fuller (I Shot Jesse James, House of Bamboo) and they all seem to have coasted past the censors they were designed to provoke.

The final return to a brass band welcome (compare John Cromwell’s unjustly neglected The Mighty of  two years later) still retains attention and mixes irony, triumph and regret in exactly the measures to make the film resonant. I like Dunkirk but this one leaves it standing. Christopher Nolan must have been familiar with the precedent of Wings and his film has the same stance - only showing the combatants with no one higher than a field officer appearing and no consideration of the motives or justification for their wars. Combat may be an extraordinary experience but there is nothing heroic about it, with death coming without reason.

 

Wings is of a piece. Its preposterous sentimentality and melodrama are the engines that drive it. Beyond it’s qualities as entertainment and spectacle is it’s ability to draw the viewer back into the mind set of  the people who first watched it more than a decade before I was born. Even more so than brilliant, then contemporary, work like Lonesome, Asphalt or The Wind, this one registers because it is a pipe line into the attitudes of it’s day and even people who don’t understand that can still be mesmerised by it.

Julian Johnson’s (Docks of New York, The Way of All Flesh) intertitles never attract comment but he was the master of this short lived craft, even more so than Thomas Ince’s celebrated C. Gardner Sulivan. “These young warriors of the sky whose wings are folded about them forever.” The flying scenes would be incomprehensible without his work which never comes as an interruption. “Zooming upward to pour a stream of fire into the belly of the monster.” As superimposed captions these later worked nicely in sound documentary but his career still ground to a halt.

Veteran Harry Perry’s principal photography is mainly unostentatious with only the odd flourish (the swing, the cafe track) but he was surrounded by a small army of  portable Akely camera wielding photographers, Russell Harlan, William Clothier, Ernest Lazlo and George Stevens among them. The cutting is spot on.

Roy Pomeroy’s early downwards model shot crash is pretty feeble and when they later pile the real plane into a full size church, Wellman’s lot make a point of having an actor run into the shot before the edit, to establish that there’s no faking.

Wings - William A. Wellman

 The support cast is intriguing.  The dreadful El Brendel is quite acceptable here though he is largely replaced by character comic Roscoe Karns in the second half. Bit parts include Hedda Hopper as Rogers’ mum, director Charles Barton chatting up Bow, Wellman himself calling out that the planes may be of use after all from the battle field, Henry B. Walthall (Birth  of a Nation’s Little Colonel) asserting himself in a wheel chair and the Paris floozy is elegant Arlette Marchal (Michael Curtiz’ Princess Urseti in Moon of Israel - good luck trying to see her other work). Which one is Thomas Carr and is that George Chandler exiting the recruiting office? Of course the stand out is Gary Cooper whose one minute turn launched him on the greatest star career in movies.

Wings - Arlen and Cooper.

The new sound track uses an original first run score by J.S. Zamecnik who produced a lot of the sheet music played with silent films. It mixes pop songs of the day, most of which are now forgotten and come across as original music, along with his Mendelssohn selections. Forty years before Stanley Kubric, Mr. Zamencnik put classical music on flight footage. We  spot “None But the Lonely Heart”, “Dark Town Strutters’ Ball” and particularly in the Paris scene’s “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”  All this has been impeccably orchestrated and re-recorded.

I was worried by the news that Skywalker had added in an effects track but this has been confined to motor noise and blasts and works remarkably well. The people who did this obviously knew what they were about.

The image is slightly grainy but the irregularities in the texture caused by second generation negative, notably in the Bubbles sequence, have been largely ironed out and the piece simulates the original tinting. The only way to improve on this result would be to have a first run 35 mil. ortho copy playing with a live orchestra. We have the moon. Let’s not ask for the stars.

Well what happened? I don’t know about Melbourne where it played half a dozen venues but at the Chauvel it drew single figure audiences. The night I went there were three people, one who came on the recommendation of his ninety year old mum. What did the proprietors expect? No question of core audience. There hasn’t been a half way serious Cinematheque in Sydney since 1978. It’s doubtful that even people here who turned out in escalating numbers as word of mouth spread for the Gaumont retrospective are still about. Palace put up a poster in the foyer and listed it in their press advts. (at least they still do press advts.) Where was the feature on the ABC, the two page article in the Herald, the ticket give-aways on radio, the guru extolling it on morning TV? Who have they got could do justice to this one anyway?

We know that this neglect of  serious film has drained Australian production but what
must it’s effect be on the understanding of wider, less obviously connected areas?