ITALIAN JOBS.

Italy is the world I know turned around just enough to be surprising - sewer covers lettered SPQR like the art direction in the gladiator movies, pets in food stores. A friend in open sandals found a dog the size of a pony took an interest in her toes.

Getting back to Rome after fifty years I’m struck by how much their movie scene still lags behind Paris.

The TV was plugging Cinecittà World, a theme park near the studios 45 minutes outside Rome, but the promo was all water slides and bikini girls, neither of which I was in a situation to enjoy. The day I thought about going it was closed. Visitors said that the sets that you can inspect in the actual studio were more interesting.

In the area where I was staying, there were three cinemas. One was padlocked. One was closed for the summer and one was Nanni Moretti’s small art movie house Cinema Sacher doing the Ceylan Ahlat Agaci / The Wild Pear Tree twice a day.

Exploring further I did find a couple of store front multiplexes and I passed a nineteen- screen multisala in the train but I didn’t get to see their insides with the time constraints. There was also the old problem. Most films in Italy are dubbed into Italian.

 Now they do get a few films showing in original language versions, six at the moment in Rome - most big budget Anglo American productions. Five of their seven top box office movies are American but those returns come from the Italian dubbed versions.

Curiously the one Italian film I did see, Saverio Costanzo’s L'amica geniale / My Brilliant Friend, actually half a TV series being presented in a theatrical version, was subtitled - into Italian presumably to deal with the problems of regional dialect. That one covered the two Neapolitan school girls growing up in the 1950s poor suburb where the women converse from the balconies while drama plays out at street level. Most memorable episode has the two girls hiding their school uniforms and setting out to walk to the ocean which they never reach, like the lovers in the 1969 John Huston A Walk With Love and Death. 

 With it’s studiofied look and obvious plot dynamics - the nice people getting roughed up while heavies like the bullying bar owner pull ahead - this one plays like an inferior Ettore Scola film. Max Richter’s score is an asset.

The language problem persists into the shrinking DVD market. The La Felterinelli chain seems to be the last source. They have gulped down Ricordi Milan, my favourite Italian DVD store,  and shifted some of it’s people to the their shop in the Central Rail Station. Their stock is extensive but it is nearly all in Italian including the foreign movies. These are again overwhelmingly recent though there is a good representation on Alberto Sordi. Some of the stock is sub-titled - In Italian. It seems that deaf Italians are a considered a better market that the rest of the world. Their disks were too expensive to speculate on.

L'amica geniale

A few of the street news kiosks have standees with cheap, dust covered boxed DVDs but the over-whelming bulk of those are old American movies  in Italian.

Milan, the country’s second largest city, has some of the most beautiful cinema auditoria I know. The sub-titles problem persists and their quasi Cinematheque has been moved from a down town location to their Film School dedicated to the memory of Luchino Visconti in the Museo Interattivo del Cinema in the Manifattura Tabacchi at 121 Viale Fulvio Testi, on the outskirts a couple of stops before the end of the Metro.

I investigated - a few nice things like a selection of WW1 era movie posters, André Deed, Tom Mix and the rest, and a monitor running theater advertising from the forties.

Turin Film Museum.

Museo Interattivo Milan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They had a lengthy compilation of Milan filmed movie clips - lots of  Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli, nothing from Lizzani’s 1968 Banditi a Milano/ The Violent Four or the Kautner 1962 Die Rote. Characteristic of these, the projected image was washed out by the flood lighting for an exhibit where you can insert yourself into a picture with Woody Allen. As I was the only visitor (they were really helpful finding an English speaking staffer to show me around) they turned this off for my benefit.

Like the more ambitious and thoroughly disappointing Turin film Museum, this one was produced to a museum sensibility - artifacts and touch screens. However, unlike Turin where they have to go up the road to the local multiplex, Milan has it’s own theater with a regular screening program.

The day I was there they showed a nice Digital restoration of Mauro Bolognini’s 1972 Imputazione di omicidio per uno studente / Chronicle of a Homicide

This one is Bolognin’s idea of a Damiani style Years of Lead political thriller. Massimo Ranieri (Bolognini’s Metello) is the son of Judge Martin Balsam and still looking good Valentina Cortese. Ranieri is involved in student politics and at a demonstration sees a cop kill a manifestor. Ranieri takes out the officer with a metal knuckle duster starting an intense police hunt.

Balsam conducts his own investigation and finds brutality and corruption in the force and at the Palace of Justice. Officers intent on covering their own tails are roughing up one of the protestors in the hope of getting the identity of the cop killer and they raid student headquarters. Ranieri confesses to Balsam and hands over the weapon and Martin finds his wife siding with the boy. Much anguish as he tries to reconcile his life long beliefs and the realities that conflict with them.

The performances were superior and film making was standard issue Italian seventies A feature but the content was boiler plate. Their notion of Student Headquarters with Che posters on the wall and topless Marxist model girls wandering about was comic. It did not reflect my experience of female Marxists.

We were an audience of three. I think the other two worked in the building. I did get  to chat with the operator who described his Two K presentation and mentioned that they still used 35mm for films that only existed in that format like the Toto movie from the day before. They were in the middle of a Hitchcock season. It would have been interesting to see whether that drew better attendances.

I also managed to catch Alessandro Aronadio’s  Basta credere, Io c'è / Just Believe an

intermittently clever comic new Italian A feature take on religion with good people. It has been shown here in festivals.

In that, Edoardo Leo’s inheritance is wiped out by the uniform currency and he finds himself

struggling to make a living running the family home as a B&B returning 200 Euro a month after taxes. Sister Margherita Buy does his accounts and offers to buy him out, with her husband who turns out to be a low life. 

However noticing Gegia Gegia’s  nuns across the square don’t pay anything, Leo starts thinking.  He checks into their “Franciscan” operation with its Four AM mass and a giant Madonna in his room and decides to start his own religion. Leo consults a priest, a rabbi

and a mullah who all get stern with him - a cross cut faith montage like the one in Aamir

Khan’s great 2014 Indian film P.K.

Edoardo turns to his friend, minimally published author author Giuseppe Battison who works up the theology of “selfism” which pivots on the mirror Leo bought in a flea market for 12 Euro.

Leo with the faithful: Basta credere, Io c'è

They don’t have commandments - just suggestions.

This proves a success and livens up his social life but Leo finds he’s dug himself into a pit with his followers’ demands, Battison going apostate and a court action after Leo smashes the mirror - destroying a religious object.

Buy is wasted but  the aggro, dark glasses wearing, graffiti painting nuns are a great comic concept.

It would be interesting to hang about long enough to find out what the dynamics driving the Italian film scene really are. 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2019