ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2020. 

 Well it’s our first national event to come back theatrically in the time of the plague which means Palace’s new Italian Film Festival carries more than it’s share of weight for one of these. The schedule is reduced and the seating spaced, so it’s something of a relief to find a couple of the sessions of Il Traditore at the Chauvel at capacity. It re-assures you that there’s a future for these. 

Some of the material that I’ve watched has been disappointing but  Odio l'estate / I Hate Summer was particularly welcome. One of the big ticks against the Italian Film Festivals has been that they revealed the Aldo (Baglio) Giacomo (Poretti) and Giovanni (Storti) comedy trio to us. Well the boys haven’t been doing so well lately, directing a film of their own or making solo ventures none of which seem to have been received with all that much enthusiasm. I did manage to find a couple of DVDs of their later output but a lack of translation defeats me. Here however they are working with director-writer Massimo Venier again, in an impeccable, sub-titled theatrical copy. 

 It turns out to be among their best work. One of the nice things about it is that they keep on nudging us with moments that say though they’ve been at it for twenty five years, they can still work variations. The film opens disturbingly with a shot of Aldo in a wheel chair. Even if it’s deceptive, it prepares us for an effective twist. The main plot is a more conventional situation where the three Milanese families take annual holidays at the same time and find that the booking agency has mistakenly let the nice beachside home to all of them simultaneously. Even with the intervention of benign silver fox Carabiniere Michele Placido (Michele Placido!) they can’t sort this out. Actually the agent calls in with alternative five star accommodation but Aldo’s teen age son, out on parole after heisting a motor bike, takes the call and, eyeing the co-tenant’s daughter in a bikini, tells them not to bother. 

New Movies are now knee deep in the Les Petits mouchoirs, Grown-Ups, Palm Beach cycle of films about people we don’t normally associate, playing characters going on holiday with people they grew up with but this is one about individuals we know actually have a long association, playing at meeting for the first time. It’s enough of a difference to throw our expectations out of kilter.

Odio l'estate / I Hate Summer :The boys with Millie Fortunato Asquini 

 

 

 

 

 

Giovanni’s shoe store is failing and dentist Giacomo runs into a disgruntled patient he left with a permanent leer. We get usual gags like Giovanni building a shack on the sand which collapses when a single stick is removed to throw for the dog. One of the kids runs off to be with his Danish family pen friend and the dog has to be tracked by satellite. 

This is all background to the remarkably appealing business of the three fathers growing together into the trio we remember from their earlier films, while an engaging trio of wives, Lucia Mascino, Carlotta Natoli, Maria Di Biase drink, exchange experience and go skinny dipping. The sting is in the tail when life-long Massimo Ranieri fan Aldo finds that their excursion has landed him up where his idol is going to give a concert that night and it turns out that Ranieri owes dentist Giacomo a favor which translates into best seats and an irresistible surprise. To me Massimo Ranieri had been the juvenile from Bubù and Metello but here he is in his seventies, with Aldo Baglio declaring “Massimo Ranieri revolutionised Italian music.” It’s a throwback to my first being drawn to movies because they were a way into unfamiliar worlds - inhabited by the likes of Wyatt Earp, Maxim Gorki or Chen pei pei.

 It may be that the appeal is lost on viewers not familiar with Aldo, Giacomo and Giovanni - include most programmers outside Italy - but the film strikes me as a great stands alone night at the movies as well as a welcome and unfortunately rare chance to see one of the most engaging movie teams. 

Jack London was an author who was much better writing about dogs than he was on people but film makers keep on struggling to get movies out of “Call of the Wild” and “The Sea Wolf” and there have been half a dozen movie Martin Edens including Glenn Ford and Hobart Bosworth - or even Michael O’Shea in the elements which were cannibalized for a London movie biography. The book has been described as the first best seller. This new Italian nominal adaptation gets thoroughly lost with it’s shift to Milan sawing off it’s comments on the American dream and the 1907 time frame, which offered relevance, destroyed by arbitrary anachronisms - manual typewriter, TVs and colour movie show, imposing stock shot of a windjammer in full sail sinking and black shirts giving hair cuts on the beach as war breaks out.

Luca Marinelli as Martin Eden.

 What we get is wild eyed Luca Marinelli as a sailor saving bourgeois kid Giustiniano Alpi from a beating and introduced to his well off family, being understandably taken with sister Jessica Cressy who speaks French to him and plants the idea that he can only better himself with education. He starts buying second hand books in the junk shop though the school ma’ams sorting candidates for mature age training tell him he’d have to go back to primary school. (stock shot of grinning gap toothed peasant in the class room) Marinelli becomes enamored of the social Darwinism of 19th Century philosopher Herbert Spencer and gets into conflict with the socialists. 

Ailing poet Carlo Cecchi takes him in hand while Marinelli’s manuscripts keep on coming back with rejection notices. Marinelli’s refusal to accept a respectable office job to create a home for them makes Cressy refuse him just before he turns into a successful writer. Cut to Marinelli become Oblomov (keep the references obscure), his new wealth causing him to reject the people who failed to support his ambitions while showering good fortune on the humble souls who looked after him, like single mum Carmen Pommella. The remains of the women in the book keep on turning up as the also fetching Denise Sardisco. 

This largely formless pastiche is filmed murkily in super sixteen with minimal shadow detail and lots of grain. The performances and some of the staging give the piece occasional dignity and build expectations which it is unable to fulfill. While it’s form is very different from the stylish costume art movies of the sixties Martin Eden is aimed at the same audience who want to believe they are absorbing something more substantial than popular entertainment. They are easily bluffed. 

 

It’s a major disappointment to find that the new Gianni Amelio film Hammamet is impenetrable to anyone not immersed in the Italian scene. I rate Amelio (Porte Aperte, Tenerezza) the most talented of the current Italian film makers and this is the first of his films that has failed to impress me.

 At the risk of over simplifying, in 1983 Bettino Craxi became the first socialist to become Prime Minister of Italy. His policies included rejecting Italy's prominent Communist party, opposing the USA on the Achille Lauro terrorists affair and supporting Arab Nationalists. He was driven out of office by a scandal which indicated that party funding had been obtained illegally and that he had lived luxuriously off it, fleeing from Italy to a villa at Hammamet in Tunisia. You’d think there was enough in there for a couple of major dramatic movies. 

Not all of this makes it’s way into Amelio’s film which features Pierfrancesco Favino as Craxi in an amazing make up job where you have to stare at the eyes to recognise Favino. Someone gets a credit for eye brows. He doesn’t look much like photos of Craxi either which makes you wonder why they bothered. The film has a thin plot where Luca Filippi as the son of a fellow politician breaks into the one time Prime Minister’s numerous scorta-protected Hammanet villa, bringing a letter from his father. Craxi/Favino embraces the boy found coated in sludge from sheltering in the near empty swimming pool and moves him in, to the concern of Craxi’s daughter, Livia Rossi from Amelio’s Intrepido: A Lonely Hero. 

Favino (!) and Amelio : Hammamet

The central character’s health deteriorates and he is visited by real or imaginary figures from his past. The only familiar face is Omero Antonutti as his father. There’s a nice dialogue conducted on what appears to be the roof of Milan Cathedral. Around this, suspect detail from the politician’s life is thrown into the mix. The Milanese doctors sent to operate on Craxi flee the grubby Tunisian facilities they are offered. The film is bookended by Craxi as a boy smashing Seminary windows with a catapult.

The opening impresses with a giant socialist rally where Favino’s figure on the rostrum is dwarfed by the triangular big screen images of his face being played to the audience. This is misleading with nothing as filmic to follow, not to say that the film lacks anything technically. Amelio’s son Luan is now on camera for his work. They did the short Passatempo together last year. There’s a formidable piece of operating with kids running behind the camera car as the titles are superimposed on the single take, ending exactly on its mark to get the best composed static image of the compound gates. Performances are also superior, so much so that it’s a major disappointment when all these interesting looking people just talk endlessly. Filippi buys a pistol and vanishes without taking it out of his ever present knapsack. 

 I’m not the best person to give an opinion on this one. Not only do I not know any of the background but I dosed off a couple of times during the two hours plus screening. 

 

Traditore :Favino

 

More later...
 

 

Barrie Pattison 2020