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.