SPROCKETED SOURCES

 ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Running level with the Sydney Film Festival makes comparisons inevitable and I can't help noticing that a smallish number of popular movies over a month makes this more approachable. Time and money made me selective with this material but the strike rate was pretty good on what I did see.

 

I've already covered Si mi vuoi bene / If You Care for Me in the report I did on Rome and Ricardo Milani’s Come un gatto in Tangenzziale - ritorno a coccia di morto /Like a Cat on a Highway 2 and Daniele Luchetti’s superior Lacci / The Ties in this event.

The admirable Alba Rowacher seems to have a lock on these. After Lacci we get her heading up Nanni Moretti’s also excellent Tre piani / Three Floors. That one opens with Alba, clearly pregnant, struggling with a suitcase at night as Alessandro Sperduti’s car just misses her and takes out a pedestrian before crashing into the front of the three store condo which houses the narrative. No two reels of waves breaking on rocks on the front this one.

The ground floor space is where Elena Lietti and Riccardo Scamarcio and their seven-year-old daughter live. We learn they have been having elderly Paolo Graziosi sit their young daughter but his behavior is becoming erratic and his memory failing. When the narrative swings back to them the old man and the child go missing and a police search locates them in a nearby park.

Scaramacio suspects the worst and attacks hospitalised Graziosi accusing him of having
molested the child. The old man’s wife, a wasted Anna Bonaiuto, is furious. The shifting plan of the story later has Scaramacio in court for sexual misconduct with teenage girl Denise Tantucci - a striking, explicit scene which, with its later coda, is both one of the most telling elements of the film and the one which seems to have generated antagonism in published criticism.

Left alone by her oil rig worker husband Adriano Giannini (the son in Lacci), Rowacher is forbidden the aid of his generous brother who once was an admirer and the brother ends on the run after inquiries into his mob connection. Alba acts, haunted by memories of her own disturbed mother and the curiously eerie appearances of a crow in her living space.

The third floor tenants are senior judges Margherita Buy and Moretti and it was their son drunk behind the car wheel in the the opening scene. Moretti is unbending in refusing to bring his influence to give the boy support, turning family relations grim all round. It is this plot strain that ends the film with Buy, as always, touching.

Throw in an aid store-house fire bombed by a racist mob and Moretti signature touches. His Sacher firm made the film and that looks like the front of his Roman Sacher movie house in one scene’s background, while we can spot a Vespa rider, his Caro Dario trade mark, distant behind the dance company in the street. - nice.

Moretti

 

 

The contrasted performances would elevate any production. You could say this is an old fashioned soaper (and people have) but it has a care and force rare in current movies and I rate it among it’s maker’s best.  

With lead roles in Amelio’s Teneressa, the Luchetti Mio fratello é uni figlia unico and La nostra vita and Vicari’s impressive Diaz ; Don’t Clean up the Blood,   Elio Germano has managed to assert himself in a large slice of the most interesting recent Italian films but his new portrayal of renowned primitive artist Toni Ligabue in Giorgio Diritti‘s film biography Volevo nascondermi / Hidden Away  raises the stakes. What he does here is extraordinary. Germano transforms himself to the point of unrecognizablity. We’re channeling Paul Muni.  It means Germano takes on a character who it’s a stretch to accept with sympathy. 

 

  Volevo nascondermi - Elio Germano

Diritti’s film follows the life of the celebrated Toni Ligabue (also covered in a 1977 mini series part scripted by Cesare Zavattini) but a synopsis doesn’t represent the film adequately. They want to display the evolution of Ligabue’s art, going to the extent of making the early sections so dark that it is hard to see what it happening - and using minimum editing.

Young Toni is born in Zurich, and regarded as feeble minded orphan by the people who raise him until the Swiss authorities deport him to his dead mother’s native Italy to save them the expense of his institutionalization. His (and the film’s) misery only increase as we have the grim spectacle of him foraging for something to keep him alive. We are barely aware this is the period of the growth of Italian fascism.

His life of scavenging and squatting brings him into contact with abandoned artists' materials and sculptor Renato Marino Mazzacurati (Pietro Traldi) recognizes his talent and provides him with the oil paints with which he will do his famous work. Mazzacurati’s mother (Orietta Notari) looks after him in their home - one of the film’s few characters registering sympathetic. The film becomes more coherent as we begin to see what we recognize as the Ligabue style in the work Germano is shown producing.

However an art critic recognizes the power in his paintings of tigers and farm yard animals and a documentary film maker from Rome includes his output in a Po Valley subject he is making. Toni becomes a celebrity and he is able to sell his work at increasing prices, spending the money on motorcycles and eventually a car with a driver who introduces him to the better living - women and restaurant dining.  Toni brings his caged rabbits into his hotel room. The film's actress turns up in his bed and the Fascist mayor, who saw him as a liability, finds him a house to live in and create now that he is a prize winner whose medals impress the locals who never took his art seriously. We recognise from the paintings the rural Alto Adige and Reggio Emilia scenics in the film images. Episodes like the one of the impressive lion statue stranded in the field when the fuel to transport in runs out, have a narrative form. The film making is now more conventional and the images brighter.

Volevo nascondermi - Germano

As is pretty much obligatory in one of these, the character’s waning strength means that he is unable to realise the fantasies he paints on the wall of his home. Her mother dismisses Germano’s interest in pregnant servant girl Francesca Manfredini he would have liked to marry. Germano’s complete transformation, the recreation of the pre-WW2 rural environment and the agony of a vision in a body and mind unable to utilize it, are imposing. 

 

There remains the question of whether the skill of the makers has managed to elevate Volevo nascondermi from a boiler plate anguished artist biography into what a theatrical movie audience will absorb and admire or is it just replaying their on-screen narrative, offering something that is too grim and too locked into a high art sensibility to fit comfortably where it finds itself.

Claudio Noce’s Padrenostro / Our Father has a suitably suspenseful present day opening when a power outage creates panic underground in the Metro. It’s easy to forget this as we get to the real narrative, something that might be a Sixth Sense rip-off mixed in with a"Years of Lead" thriller all drawn distantly from director Noce’s childhood experience, when his own father was a targeted deputy police commissioner in Rome.

Young (chosen to look blonde angelic) Mattia Garaci is into slipping chicken schnitzel to his imaginary friend in the attic which he has decorated with drawings. The kid witnesses a jolting shoot out attack wounding his father, star Pierfrancesco Favino dominating his scenes. His teacher tells Garaci’s class mates  his dad is a hero but one of them sees Favino as a traitor. The threat of violent retaliation animates the picture.

Garaci encounters Francesco Gheghi, archetypal older bad boy who is everything his embracing middle class family is not ... so much so that he seems to be the imaginary friend made flesh, as the pair skip school and play soccer together. The film’s most striking moment is when a downwards shot reveals  their game to be sketching out the shooting as chalk outlines on the asphalt. Mother Barbara Ronchi is (understandably) concerned for her child’s mental state.

Padrenostro - director Claudio Noce.

Feeling guilty about his neglect of the family, Favino gets the scorta to use a second car and drives his family to the welcoming grand- parents in the safety of sunny Calabria. Who should turn up there but Gheghi in his same scruffy outfit. That torpedoes the imaginary friend theory. Favino and the rest can see and interact with him and he’s welcomed into the family circle - not all that plausible with the security level at high.

You can put down the inconsisten -cies and unlikely developments as distorted childhood memories but that’s a tough trick to pull off and Noce’s film occasionally irritates and outstays it’s welcome but it’s still well crafted and plausibly involving enough to deserve consideration.

10 giorni con Babbo Natale  / When Mom Is Away With the Family is an agreeable Fabio de Luigi comedy which gets to us down a twisted path. It is the sequel to 2019’s 10 giorni senza mamma which was an Italian language re-make of the Argentinian 2017 Diego Peretti comedy Mamá se fue de viaje,  part of the current cycle of reworking European films in a new language, itself  a curious throw back to  the high days of multiple language versioning in the first years of sound. After all that, the outline of the original film (“The rabbit is on fire!”) is still visible here even if De Luigi is getting the Clark Griswold treatment.

Turns out that he is now a house husband. They reference Mister Mum which has yet more input into this scissor and paste structure - Fabio joining the society of school gate mothers. Unemployed, he’s looking after the three kids while wife Valentina Lodovini (Benvenuti al sud) continues her executive career. This is a big day because Fabio has a job interview (for which he doesn’t shave) with a potential employer who turns out to be a woman executive sending him on his way after a brief talk in the cocktail lounge of a swank hotel. The situation is getting even more tense as Ludovini is up for a promotion in Sweden and will have to be there over Xmas.

The kids have their problems, with young son Castellucci deciding he’s a Nazi, and teen age Angelica Elli having boy trouble (we keep on waiting for her to take off her glasses and be gorgeous) leaving tot Bianca Usai to be super cute. De Luigi has a solution to their problems. He takes the family camper van out of deposito (though he still hasn’t fixed the toilet) and announces that they are going to drive to Stockholm despite resistance from all. Insets of a toy van traveling across a map.

Complications ensue when Ellis finds her boy friend also en route with his new squeeze and Castellucci falls in love with a black teenager while Fabio keeps on working his cell ‘phone to find out if he got the job - oh - and they run over Santa Clause in the amnesiac form of barely recognisable Diego Abatantuono in the red suit who convinces them they should detour via Lapland to deliver him to his elves. This doesn’t make any kind of sense but it does provide some great scenics and manages to fit in with the feel good scheme.

De Luigi is in the business of these franchises with a couple of Worst Days - Worst Xmas of  My Life films and a re-make of the Sordi Il vedovo on his c.v., telling us what to expect. Director Alessandro Genovesi ( Puoi baciare lo sposo / My Big Gay Italian Wedding) works regularly with de Luigi and Abatantuono and coasts through the awkward moments and implausibilities without any visible strain. We get the impression that this was a sure earner and they didn’t hesitate to spend on it.

If you’re going to make a scarey movie set in Venice, you have to go some to override the
memory of Don’t Look Back and, even with it’s qualities, Stefano Mordini’s  Lasciami andare / Sei tornato / You Came Back doesn’t really cut it.

Stefano Accorsi (the Ozpetek Fate ignorante and La dea fortuna) is in therapy after the loss of his young son. He’s an engineer involved in reconstruction work (“Why try to keep a sinking city afloat”) and we see his work site at a time when St. Marks Square is flooded. His marriage to Maya Sansa has broken up but he is about to have a child with Serena Rossi. 

Lasciami andare / Sei tornato / You Came Back - Accorsi & Sansa in Venice.

 

The imposing Valeria Golino (now directing but will you ever forget her in Hot Shots 2?) comes looking for him. He threatens to have her turned in for stalking but her story about living in Accorsi’s old house and her son being contacted by the ghost of his dead child starts to be backed up by physical manifestations - a spooky teddy bear,  a  well informed medium, a figure obscured by moving shadow which isn’t there when the light comes - that one is good.  Between her couple of numbers Serena Rossi goes back home to her parents and desperate Sansa proposes they buy the old home back.  

Stefano goes into detective mode but despite all his efforts, Valeria’s piece of sign language remains disconcerting, along with the second trip to the medium just to confuse Stefano and the audience.

The greenish, shallow depth of field images do contribute a dank atmosphere and the cast are on top of their game but the writing isn’t strong enough to make this one fly and it falls into a trough between art movie and exploitation.

I can contain my enthusiasm for the event's retrospective on Roberto Rossellini whose already familiar work has had to stand in for the imposing body of forties Italian film for too long and for another go round for the divas of the fifties and sixties.

Padrenostro - Favino & Garaci

Barrie Pattison - 2021