MORE ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2022.

After a career in documentaries, director Leonardo Di Costanzo has made three fiction feature films, each centering on people with criminal backgrounds which separate them. Ariaferma / The Inner Cage  is more ambitious and more impressive than his 2017 l’intrus / The Intruder which I previously singled out. The new film is more stylistically daring and fields Italy’s two most noted character actors, Tony Servillo and Silvio Orlandi.

We get the 19th century Sardinian San Sebastiano di Sassari building standing in for  the film’s Mortana prison. The shot of the galleries empty and the cell doors open immediately gets attention.

The institution has been closed before the film begins. However the one female character, departing governor Francesca Ventriglia, advises that that accommodation for a dozen of the prisoners is not available and remaining staff will have to look after those, without parcels or visits, until the situation is resolved. The  induction area rotunda is pressed into service - unease all round.

The characters are from stock. Menacing inmates and hard-assed guards, without giving them any special characteristics. They are differentiated by costumes more than plot or mannerisms. However, subtly, uniformed Polizia Penitenzi Officer Servillo and bespectacled Orlandi, coming to the end of his sentence for his never specified crime, assert as the leaders of the two factions.

The crunch point comes with the meals freighted in foil packs from outside. The prisoners reject them and they and the staff watch the situation uneasily - a prison revolt will impact the circumstances of both groups. Orlandi volunteers to use the deactivated kitchen. Servillo will supervise him unescorted.  Silvio’s mushroom dish proves a hit - guards served first - and the one close up I can recall in the film is his appetising meatballs bubbling in tomato sauce.

Ariaferma / The Inner Cage - Tony Servillo & Silvio Orlandi.

Conversation between the two leads has Orlandi suggesting their community which Servillo rejects. “I can sleep at night without regret.” Tensions ratchet up on the return to custody of a young mugger and bringing the elderly child molester out of solitary. A supply problem sends Orlandi and Servillo into the institution’s already overgrown garden, where finally they talk informally and provide the film’s one revelation.

Then for an action climax, the power supply gives out and the disapproving deputy calls in the riot cops from the local caserna to wait in full gear in the corridor outside. The prisoners have to move the tables from the cells for the meal to be served in darkness illuminated only by pressure lamps. Servillo allows the tables to be put together to form a common dining and serving area and the guards and prisoners join a song. This creates a formidable high point.

There’s no doubt that The Inner Cage is an achievement, a peak in the career of leads and director. The tension both from the characters’ apprehensive behavior and our experience of other prison movies has the audience expecting violence and confrontation - a cotello missing from the locked cupboard that Servillo checks each session, with the hanging knife shapes outlined in white paint?

A different movie would have traded in that. What we do get is superior to most of what is in this event or available on the festival circuit. The film making is remarkable with the expert Luca Bigazzi’s images drained of colour. The guards’ black and white outfits mesh with this. Throw in the intimidating historic building and the distinctive regional score and we are half way to a substantial piece before we even get started.

Another of Francesca Archibugi’s twisted family relationship pieces, Il colibrì / The Hummingbird was complex to the point of being hard to follow, as we shift between generations and locations. Clues like a fifties VW Beetle or vintage top ten hits (include “I’ll Be Seing You”) don’t clarify the structure sufficiently.

Il colibrì / The Hummingbird - Bejo & Favino

One more time Pierfrancesco Favino’s character emerges as central at each stage, being thrown off a proving-to-be-doomed aircraft because his teen-aged friend is spooked by the presence of boy scouts, seeking out air line employee erratic Kasia Smutniak believing she missed the same plane over a bone marrow transplant treatment, though his real passion is for the ever appealing Bérénice Bejo, a neighbor become his Paris rendez-vous.

Unethically, Smuniak’s shrink Nanni Moretti shows up in Dr. Favino’s surgery with a warning, about the time we get an unexplained insert of a body hanging on a rock face from an alpinist’s line. We think we’re going to be disappointed when Moretti doesn’t come back but he shows up again and his “La vita” monologue is the film’s highlight. Compare the psychiatrist in Archibugi’s L’albero delle pere. The generation structure of her Marcelo Mastroianni film Verso sera also throws a shadow to this one.

Favino ends raising a mixed blood grand daughter, after his own child, with a thing about being tied to the wall by an invisible line compared to the alpinist’s, drops out. A vindictive colleague plans Pierfrancesco’s ruin at a Chalet Poker game, but that ends reintroducing his own mother’s architectural photo collection and we work round to great aging make ups and assisted suicide.

If that description sounds incoherent, you’ve pretty well got my take on the film. Strong cast and production occasionally command respect.

Not dissimilarly, Supereroi / Superheroes turned out to be an A feature Italian romance from the director of the much cloned Perfect Strangers. We start with mathematician  Alessandro Borghi rescuing strip cartoonist Jasmine Trinca (both in Fortunata) in a down pour. He’s calculated the random odds of them meeting again and helps chance by writing his ‘phone number on the umbrella he gives her but the rain blurs it. Needless to say they become your classic movie romance (“I need her madness”)  despite him having a heart attack attended by his ex, Dr. Greta Scarano, and Trinka’s fling with a colleague.

The novelty is her drawings, her girl character Druscilla cartoons moving to her "Supereroi" comic books where she has sold publisher Beppe Severgnini the idea of  an ordinary couple, represented by drawings of  herself and Borghi  as super heroes, because they deal with the challenges of real life - add touches like showing them simultaneously becoming pregnant (prosthetic bellies feature in the credits). There’s more sparing use of animation, as with her explaining outfitting the new flat as drawn furniture appears in the live action photography. That’s quite nice.

More irritating, the piece is full bottle on a couple of current trends  - dim images and out of sequence time structure, neither of which make it easier to follow. We get a few clues from Borghi, disconcerting the lecture class where he had demonstrated molecular attraction with a giant rubber band, telling them what he’s said about the randomness of the universe is wrong -  and with references to Love Actually!

The cast are all over this one and location filming in Milan and Ponza is attractive but the piece is finally suds classed up.

If you’re actually looking for soggy, there’s Davide Minnella’s La cena perfetta / The Perfect Dinner which the festival organisers pushed vigorously. The foodie subject matter recalls Minella’s  2010 Come si deve.

Pizzeria man Salvatore Esposito (TV Gomorrah) is a lower echelon Naples Camora
soldier, who Don Gianfranco Gallo, "Pasquale the  Knife", doesn’t trust, even before
Esposito lets his boyhood friend  do a runner with the syndicate’s cash, when he
should have brought down the hammer on him.

As a punishment, Esposito’s moved to Rome to run The Blue Woodpecker, an up-market restaurant taken over as “a laundry” to legitimise mob funds - passively complicit like Tony Sevillo in  Le conseguenze dell'amore.  Turns out abrasive Argentinian cook Greta Scarano again was ousted from the place. A couple of things are obvious. The pair are going to become an item and we are in for “food porn” with the meals filmed more sensuously than the sex. There’s even a line of dialogue about the carnality of eating.

Less convincingly, we get the abrasive master chef cliché along with the notion that her superior technique lacks the heart of Esposito’s dead granny’s cooking, something the celebrity critic commented before the mob closed The Blue Woodpecker (cf. Edward Andrews even more implausible podium pronouncements in Youngblood Hawke). Esposito’s teddy bear charm softens Scarano’s rough edges - winning back the offended market fishmonger and finding a spot for the former “chef” whose job was to load frozen meals into the microwaves. We get an appreciative audience gasp when she steps smartly across the room to kiss Salvatore.

There's more detail, like the fact that it takes years of loss-making before top level restaurants earn a Michelin star and go into profit or the nice scene where Rome’s great chefs gather, behind the rolled down shutter after closing, to try one another’s specialties and Esposito’s pasta with potatoes is a hit.

By the time we get to the implausibly happy ending, belief has been suspended in favor of feel good. The film offers one remarkable comic-tense scene (“You’re making a meal for the people who have come to kill you”) with the murderous heavy waving his pistol in front of Gallo, who still insists on tasting the traditional desert he remembers from his childhood. Balancing rom-com and Mafia thriller is a delicate operation which La cena perfetta doesn’t always get right but it is finally winning.

 

Fabio De Luigi registered with the 2011 The Worst Week of My Life cycle as another sad sack Italian funny man. Last time I saw him was in a remake of an Alberto Sordi film, so it's a surprise to find him a few years older fronting the original and stylish E noi come stronzi rimanemmo a guardare / On Our Watch, a kind of grim science fiction comedy.

This one kicks off with De Luigi and the fetching Valeria Solarino  (the I Can Quit Whenever I Want films) getting Hitler mustaches dabbed on so they can join the Nazi choreography at the dance party. This is actually bad taste funny. Of course it telegraphs the downfall awaiting Fabio, when facial recognition rejects him at  the gates to his workplace. He developed the App that has now identified him as redundant, in front of stairs full of his co-workers, and his office space is required to put the coffee machine.

On Our Watch - De Luigi and Pastorelli

Already living beyond his means, Fabio has to go flat share on the apartment he bought to tempt Solarino -  less funny sequence of him and the film’s director Pif (The Mafia Only Kill in the Summer) locating one another by satnav when they are standing a yard apart. Professor of Romance Philology Pif moonlights as a professional phone abuser.

In desperation, Fabio signs up with the Fuuber (get it!) bike messenger service created by an English speaking Billionaire who operates out of a tower in Mumbai. Our hero comes to terms with the impossible schedules his mobile gives him as a penalty for not keeping up and he proves inventive, eating the egg plant the customer doesn’t want on her pizza out of her sight to return with it as a replacement. Battered and light up  back packed, he even finds himself delivering to a party with Solarino. However the harness on his rucksack stops opening and, as a replacement costs more than he’s making, he spends the body of the film strapped into it - sleeping and biking. The one consolation is the free trial of a Fuuber Friend hologram projected by his phone. This turns out to be Ilenia Pastorelli, the star of the new Dario Argento movie Dark Glasses. There’s a really nice scene where he has her fly over Roman landmarks.

Comes a moment of truth (and an amusingly relevant citation of  Bicycle Thieves) and Fabio revolts, joins choreographed high rise window washers and attempts a rescue, downing turbaned bouncers, but in his penthouse John Fuuber is all knowing.

This one curiously extends the line of rage against the machines movies like Metropolis, Modern Times and Videodrome and is not outclassed. There’s disturbing plausibility to Pif’s vision of the near future and it’s delivered in a series of striking, manufactured city scape tableaux which lodge in the mind. The cast are similarly superior. Spot still active Maurizio Nichetti (1989’s Ladri di saponette) as a fellow rider.

The director and de Luigi are doing their most mature work and I’m waiting for their next efforts with considerable interest.

Like a lot of fiction film makers turning to documentary, in his affectionate Ennio - The Glance of Music, Giuseppe Tornatore misjudges how much information his audience can absorb and it would take a couple of viewings and some musical training to follow his two hour thirty six minute study of the now late Ennio Morricone. The film asserts that he is the most important film composer of  all time and, while comparisons are odorous, the only one I could back against him would be the long lasting Max Steiner.

Tornatore, who had Morricone score his break through Cinema Paradiso, traces his subject’s home life with a band trumpet playing father and his academic training where he came under the influence of John Cage and started dismantling musical instruments to produce the unfamiliar sounds that we see as a signature.

In a formidable effort, Tornatorre (with his subject on right) has been able to lever his own celebrity status to round up most of  Morricone’s big time associates for interviews - Clint Eastwood and the Leones, Montaldo and Joan Baez, Quentin Tarantino, Roberto Faenza, Dario Argento, David Putnam, Carlo Verdone - the end roller goes on forever.

The most lasting impression comes from incidentals - Petri and Ruggero Mastoianni wanting to track Investigation of a Citizen with the score from Franco Mondo Carne Prosperi’s (“terrible” Morricone incorrectly says) Tecinco de unomicidia / The Hired Gun and they show the scene in B&W, with that music fitting nicely. I hadn’t noticed how Corbucci’s superior Il Grande Silencio is organised round the absence of sound - Trintignant as a mute, the horses’ hoof beats noiseless in the snow. We get Morricone playing trumpet on the church steps at the celebrity wedding.

In a curious way this one became not a film about Morricone but one about my own life, as each of the films cited evoked my encountering it. I'd had my students study Moviola by fitting footage to the Investigation of a Citizen theme. I tracked a showing of the Murnau Tartuffe with Alonsanfan and I still remember walking back across Paris to the the Gare du Nord at three in the morning, after watching the late showing on Sacco and Vanzetti, which got even later because, before starting, the staff had to take time check for O.A.S. bombs in the auditorium, where they’d just played La battaglia di Algeri. Morricone’s “Here’s To You Nicola and Bart” theme was still ringing between my ears. Richard Shickel’s 1973The Men Who Made the Movies Vincente Minnelli portrait was the only other movie that ever did that for me.

Ennio deserves more detailed consideration than it gets in a survey like this. Palace did their best with Peter Dasent’s five musician group playing a live introduction that didn’t sound all that much thinner than the sound the Maestro used a symphony orchestra to produce.

Lord of the Ants - Germano & Lo Cascio.

So the 2022 Italian Film Festival didn’t suggest a great year, even if it did come up with a couple of exceptional films in Lord of the Ants and The Inner Cage. They fielded twenty seven movies of which I managed to get to a dozen. Running it level with Pordenone on line didn’t help. Pasolini bawdy they can keep and I’m also a bit puzzled about how Casanova’s Return, a film about coming back to Venice, made it into their Neapolitan tribute.  While not everything on show was perfect, the event did offer a range of subject matter, setting and talent which it would be hard to match from another source. Subtract these and our experience of cinema would be notably less complete, less satisfying.    

Barrie Pattison - 2022