Hopes centered on Gianni Amelio’s new Il signore delle formiche / Lord of the Ants. It turns out that this is on the edge of being a masterpiece.
The Tower, a 1960s artist’s commune in Piacenza, guiding young people in theater, art and literature. Brothers Davide Vecchi and younger Leonardo Maltese are drawn into his circle, biking to the rural Tower work space. We see one of his words-as-blows rehearsal and the young people dancing in the open there.
The film opens with Vecchia and mother Anna Caterina Antonacci bursting in on Lo Cascio and Maltese asleep to have them arrested, in the city rooms they have taken. Their landlady pockets the pay off.
This comes backgrounded by scenes where the pair encountered the urban gay community which play disturbingly close to Veit Harlan’s 1957 homophobic Anders als du und ich. Maltese’s institutionalisation introduces a dim White Sister, the only representative of the Catholicism the film hints at. The cops are treated more kindly. A so-friendly doctor sets up scary electro therapy for the boy, while Lo Cascio is thrown in the slammer for “plagio” an offense put on the statute books when Mussolini didn’t want to admit there were homosexuals in Italy but figured he could nail them for coercion. Braibanti’s was the only prosecution ever launched under that act.
I’ve pretty much filled my quota on films where gay characters are persecuted by right wing authorities lately and Amelio knows he has to deliver the double load of drama and argument to hold a current audience.
At this point, involvement grows as hat wearing reporter co-star Elio Germano, emerges changing the film’s dynamic, when he provides an audience identification figure his certainties untroubled by the doubts and needs of the other characters. With his twenty first century sympathies, Germano provides both the strength and weakness in the film. He’s like Claudette Colbert in Paramount’s Maid of Salem thirties witch trials movie or the Gene Kelly character in Inherit the Wind, someone we endorse while aware he’s an anachronism. From the moment we see him at his desk in the office of the Italian Communist Party daily L’Unità, we know he’s going to end standing his typewriter on its end like the other reporters at the finish of their shifts.
Germano, who is excellent, gets to dramatise the maker’s point of view, scrapping with the editor who tells him he doesn’t want his paper to be a vehicle for perverts and shocking the visiting Russians who feel they should throw their support behind oppressed comrades till they find out what they pair are on trial for. Amelio is sharp enough to create a tension with Lo Casio who resents the way Germano is involving Lo Casio’s mother, become more victim than him, a character whose brief screen time provides a large slice of the film’s most telling moments.
Germano’s plot is elaborated with his cousin Sara Serraiocco, (a festival visitor also appealing in Il ritorno di Casanova) who organises demonstrations outside the court of which Lo Cascio is dismissive but for which his mother is profoundly grateful. Throw in Serraiocco’s regional lover who barracks her demo saying they should be protesting Vietnam.
The actual trial reaches an intensity rare on film with the two single take testimonies - the prosecution witness who we only see the one time while in the background the defense lawyer can be heard chuckling at his evidence and Maltese, watched from behind entering shattered and showing the raw scars of his shock treatment, getting to realise that the courage he is showing is making the situation worse
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| Amelio at work. |
Throw in some hard charging symbolism in Lo Cascio’s study of ants and their devotion to their community. One of the nicest touches is his revelation that prisoners and staff are collecting specimens for his jail herborium.
Anyway you assess it Lord of the Ants is a major film. It’s unlikely I’ll see anything as good this year. Film craft and performances are outstanding. The finale with actors lipsynching Tebaldi’s “Aida” for an open field performance is an effectively distanced exit point to take the film into its what happened next captions, as seventies pop numbers play.
I'm always amazed that Amelio attracts so little attention and, incidentally, I can’t help noticing that, since his break out with the exceptional 1990 Porte Aperte, the only one of his features which I’ve been unable to see is his coming-out documentary Felice chi è diverso, make of that what you will.
Italian comedy teams seem to fall outside both the popular and the fesitival nets, think Franco Franchi and Cicchio Ingrassia or Aldo, Giacomo and Giovani, which means they hardly ever qualify for sub-titles. It was not till I’d been watching them for years that I saw Franco & Cicchio translated and discovered that they actually were funny - at least in their B&W years. These are a different animal to the celebrated anti-authoritarian Commedia all’Itaniana or the vehicles for Aldo Verdone or Lino Banfi even with some overlap.
The boys grow up in the picturesque (very) hill community where the streets are too narrow for cars and all the young people are fleeing North to Milan. Their lifelong friendship only lasts till business minded Pio takes the train to the big city where he achieves financial center power, leaving his wannabe doctor pal Amedeo to become manager of the local surgical aids business.
They are re-united when it’s Amedeo sent back to assess the district civic betterment scheme. One of the town council points out they can get better than his 15 % interest offer from the Camora and suggests ‘phoning them.
Amadeo resolves to sort this out by visiting his one time friend's home in the city, meeting his media influencer associates and picking up an unhappy sales girl in the swank shop, whose mean manager he uses the store P.A. system to send scampering up and down the stairs. When he tries to borrow ingredients for the evening meal from Pio’s urban neighbors, they they tell the cops he’s a burglar.
The financial police take an interest in Pio’s business dealings, seizing his trendy furnishings, and he ends up under house arrest back with the olds he had put in a retirement home.
Gags like making city guests breathe exhaust fumes to adjust to the country air and a
framing story set in a therapy group.
I’m not sure how well this one travels. It’s amusing enough, with a nicely cynical line and lots of attractive scenics. However the shadow of Benvenuti al sud never quite leaves it.
Mario Martone’s Nostalgia proves to be two movies in one. Leading man of the moment Pierfrancesco Favino quits an established life as a businessman in Egypt to go back to his childhood home in Naples’ picturesque Rione Sanità district, finding his aged mother Aurora Quattrocchi moved into the slum ground floor flat of the building where he grew up and his old friend Tommaso Ragno, now “the bad man”, nowhere to be found. In parallel, we get a crime melo with fighting priest, balding Francesco Di Leva, first seen conducting a service on the steps of his church in defiance of the authorities. He’s battling the Camora and police regulation to save the city’s imperiled youth.
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| Nostalgia - Favino. |
Di Leva fears for Pierfrancesco’s safety and spends a day introducing him around to the drug dealer families of the children in his youth club. Finally a sinister secret is revealed as Favino makes a blind fold visit to Rangno’s base in the the guarded streets, to face the reproach that, unlike his old associate, he has home, religion, wife and business. Genuine tension has been set up.
Effective low light location shooting makes the Neapolitan setting dominate but the schizoid structure finally does in more promising elements. This one has the High Noon fault. All the characters are telling the lead to get out of town. Not to do so out of nostalgia seems to make no sense.
Simultaneously realistic and operatic, new comer Francesco Costabile’s Una Femmina - The Code of Silence is an indictment of the Calabian 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate, with grim subject matter and convincing, unfamiliar handling. A few observers have compared it to Gomorrah but the nearest I can get is the Ugo Tognazzi Sardinian family feud piece Questione d’onore, with the jokes stripped out.
This one starts in the currently fashionable dim images. Lead Lina Siciliano’s granny lures the girl’s mum back into the black hands of the mob with a face half frame close up ‘phone call. The child is made ghostly in dark mirror reflection. Severe featured Siciliano, her first role, then grows up in the remote farm home during a lull in the local blood feud, with her chubby, animal noise making cousin taking an unhealthy interest in her
(“They didn’t even write the name”) and by way of revenge, Siciliano sets about “mischief”, stirring the dormant vendetta claiming strangers are responsible for burning the goat barn and dope stash. Local capo Vincenzo Di Rosa won’t have any of that. “Blood and money don’t go together.” It’s menacing headlights in the dark time time and soon the local women are grooming Siciliano for her wedding (“Women need to be tamed”) followed by the striking march of singing, black veiled women for an enigmatic ending.
Its Calabrian setting stands this one apart. There’s even a reference to leaving the tree stump as a marriage proposal the way Mino Reitano does in Tara Poki.
Fabrizio Ferracane, who plays the authoritative uncle, has been around for twenty years and the producer’s wife Pina Turco was in Gomorrah. Otherwise its an unfamiliar cast adding authenticity. The unfamiliar location film making, using minimal lighting and severe, straight faced playing, give the material conviction but I can’t say I’d like to see this one again - or more like it.
Leading man Eduardo Leo pulled away from the herd with his sharp anti-religion satire Io c'è. I’d like to double feature that one with Aamir Kahn’s equally subversive PK.
would fit right in. I got bored half an hour before the end.
Gabriele Salvatores’s new Il ritorno di Casanova / Casanova’s Return is getting one of if it’s first outings here. I’ve always admired Salvatores’ work and the texture of this one is remarkable - the the story of movie director Toni Servillo as he edits his version of Arthur Schnitzler’s "Casanova's Heimkehr."
The Scnitzler original deals with the aging Casanova and has already been filmed several times, once by Pasquale Festa Campanile in 1978 again & by Edouard Niermans in 1998 with Alain Delon. It covers the same ground as Don Juan movies (or at least TV episodes) with Doug Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. Casanova is shown reaching his sixties as he faces a younger competitor, just like Servillo, whose film will compete with one from a younger admirer for the Venice Golden Lion. Servillo’s Casanova, star Fabrizio Bentivoglio (it's already a quarter century since he made the Australian The Missing) envies his involvement with the the gorgeous twenty something farm girl, found at one stage birthing a calf. We get a wet and raunchy scene of her and Servillo making out. The film within the film runs to elaborate costume drama in the best Barry Lyndon manner and even a naked sword fight which must have been close to the temperament of Festa Campinale.
A comparison between on screen director and his star edging towards becoming lookalikes, is pushed further. Like his subject, Servillo is shown willfully ungrateful for the support of his long time patron and friend, here the producer who has borrowed against his home to make the film, the devotion of his editor and the admiration of his younger competitor. Character and creator, make parallel returns to Venice at Carnival time.
The scenes with Servillo are in black and white while his work is shown in colour. They get their money’s worth out of this, with the editing suite where the colour images, we have already seen, appear in monochrome on the monitors while some of the full spectrum filming is so dim that the range of tones is only revealed when a light is introduced into the near black image. Once, their dissolve into the colour stock only shows when a reflection shimmers on the black water on screen. The change of format they use to differentiate time periods in Nostalgia is out classed. This is all mirrors facing mirrors, complete with the evocation of Fellini, not only in the Casanova subject but the movie making of 8&1/2.
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| Il ritorno di Casanova - Servillo |
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