ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2024

 

A  new Italian Film Festival is usually a highlight of the year's moviegoing. This year suggests we are coming to the end of one of the most interesting periods in the country's production - not De Sica, Rossellini & the Post-War Realists shading into festival favorites like Fellini and Antonioni but the work of a more approachable set of individualist directors who commentators seem to be reluctant to put in the man hours to explore - the great Etorre Scola (C'eravamo tanto amato, Le bal), Gianni Amelio (Porte aperte, La tenerezza), Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo, Quo Vadis Baby?) Giuseppe Tornatore (Nuevo cinema paradiso, La sconosciuta) and Gabriele Luchetti (Domani accadrà, La Nostra vita) who is the only one to have a film in this event.

I don't like his new Confidenza/Trust as much as Luchetti's earlier work. It pivots on that old-style art movie standard - enigma. The film kicks off with the always attention-getting man on a ledge, here the window sill of his distinctive yellow-painted medium-rise city apartment block and it moves into one of those calamity struck – or it didn't - routines which they use to unsettle the viewer throughout the film.

Turns out that our protagonist is a respected academic who has drawn Ministerial approval for his secondary school "pedagogy of love" theory which we see him explaining in a classroom, where the green board is divided into two lists – love and fear. How this works out is dramatised in a flashback structure that shows him among devoted ex-pupils who tell him one girl, (Federica Rosellini outstanding in a strong cast) someone he particularly encouraged, has dropped out of further education and become a waitress. Pretty much instantly he has sought her out and moved her in, to the ire of her grabby Villa Totosa cafe employer, and we get a glimpse of her mentor's educational technique in action using wall charts and homeschooling to inject her back into the system. However, he goes along with her urging to participate in the truth game (never a good idea in movies - La loi, Er piú ) and, after his revelation, she packs up and leaves.

The film weaves back and forward in time, revealing the lead to be Elio Germani shedding a great, inobvious age make-up job. We follow the parallel careers of the pair as she becomes an achiever while Germani marries fellow teacher Vittoria Puccini, whose own attempt at self-improvement gets no further than contact with a lecherous professor, deciding her to live in Germani's shadow. The shape of the piece clarifies with their grown daughter Pilar Fogliati recruiting now famous Rossellini as a reference for Germani's prestigious award candidature - tension from the risk of her spilling the beans on his old revelation.

Trust - Germani & Rossellini

Germani and Luchetti are the Italian A team and money has been spent on this one, dignified by it offering elaborate observation on education, family recognition and (a bit of) sex. Craft aspects and performance are superior. Unfortunately, this comes deliberately engulfed in a cloud of non-sequiturs, confusing omissions and misleading film form, which leaves the viewer struggling to construct their own version of the back story, distracted by questions like do the oranges rolling down the palace steps relate to those moldy lemons from Germani's fridge? The stamp of quality is firmly upon the piece – like one of George Stevens' failed serious films – and while Confidenza has imposing passages and effects, it unfortunately also outstays its welcome, never providing the moment of truth that would justify its pretensions.

If there’s been a movie like Margherita Vicario’s Gloria!, I haven’t seen it – think a kind of Napoleonic Mean Girls, except don’t. This one musters the servile orphans of La Pupille and a more skillful version of the dim colour of the Caravaggio’s Shadow cycle.

The opening is the most familiar element – a symphony of sound in the old Mamoulian Porgy & Bess – Love Me Tonight manner as the orphan girls of the 1800 Sant’Ignazio Institute outside Venice go about the yard chores that take up the time when they are not working under their tyrannous, played-out choir master/chaplain Paolo Rossi. Bottom-rung participant Galatéa Bellugi is bound by a kind of blackmailed vow of silence.

However this round of drudgery is to be disturbed by a Papal Coronation, the first in Venice, simultaneous with the donation of one of the then unfamiliar new pianofortes to the Intsitute’s girl orphans called upon to perform for the Papal Dignitary despite the fact that whatever talent their maestro custodian may have once possessed has been rung out by a life as turnkey for the underaged. His many guilty secrets are going to be exposed and his supporters among the local officials shamed.

Gloria - Paolo Rossi.

The film’s great innovation is that characterisation is done with the girls' music - Bellugi’s gift of the tree branch flute to the little boy raised by the Governor’s lady and her mastering the keyboard’s decidedly modern music after a simple instruction on a Mbira. Her traditionalist rival impatiently turning the hourglass by which they share the hidden piano, proves to have a surprise skill comparable to our heroine’s. One apparently minor character suddenly bursts out in an impressive singing voice.

Despite the notion that the liberty promised by the new French Revolution will fail to save the girls and indeed their miserable masters from retribution, events push forward, more by musical arrangement than narrative, to the scheduled performance, the climax with calls of excommunication and a chorus of cheering kids.

Well, we do get female solidarity and priest-bashing but the gay characters are dissolute and the film manages to hustle up a couple of defensible males for the Swiss finale, when we are getting uneasy about the substantial political correctness quota. They even provide a nice historical justification for the apparent anachronisms in the score.

Gloria! (not a character’s name but a religious citation) has the kind of charge that makes coming back for more at the movies worth the effort. I wonder whether it will achieve recognition.

Another title that they are pushing offers current heavyweight star Francesco Favino in a new major release, Edoardo de Angelis' Comandante, an accomplished production filmed in an imposing studio realist style. This one is spun off the Atlantic WW2 war incident where Royal Italian Navy submarine "Cappellini" recovered the personnel of a freighter they had sunk and ferried them to safety. Italians are big on the notion of its chivalrous WW2 Navy. It crops up in the Italian-English co-production Torpedo Bay. Dulio Colletti's 1953 I sette dell'orsa maggiore had Italian frogmen at Gibraltar tip off the British before their charges blew, to save lives. The shadow of that story can also be glimpsed in the revisionist British The Valiant.

Camandante - Favino

Comandante gives Favino a chance to shine.  We first see his captain Salvatore Todaro, abusing the doctor, who has fitted him with a steel brace to resume his duties as Comandante of the "Cappellini"  - rather than staying home soaking in the tub with bare-assed wife Silvia D'Amico. Like Coleti's film, bruta bestia Gibraltar is the target. The confronting scene of the volunteer diver among floating jellyfish, cutting the mine cables, which bar their passage, is an early highlight.

The variety of imagery they manage to put into the film's confined setting impresses. It takes a while to get the core statement –  "We are at war." "We are at sea!" With instruction to sink shipping with anything mounted on the deck, Favino's lot spots the gun on the Belgian freighter "Kabalo", which opens up on them. The Italian sub's cannon sends it to the bottom, putting its crew into fragile lifeboats,  "The Nazis would leave them in the water." 

Surprisingly the anti-fascists turn out to be the bad guys - not too much of that in current movies. 

Works out that the imposing giant submersible comes back twice for the survivors, creating extraordinary hardship on board and a further tension when only Flemish officer Johannes Wirix is able to communicate between the two crews.  Favino decides to land the Belgans and has to sail through the British fleet, who open fire as they come within range. Diving would drown the men packed into the conning tower.  We get an exceptional tension. The film's imagery is a great match for this.

Another of  Comandante's craft skills is the dramatic use of music, an interesting comparison with Gloria! Repeated cutting back to D'Amico in her slip at the piano is a motif and we have the on-board song. In particular, a scene that gets our attention early has Comandante Todro/Favino at the head of his crew at night, joining their ship. Picking up the marching rhythm, they break out in their naval anthem. Three of their women watch mute on the pier. Favino orders one man to not sail with them. He has saved the sailor's life, increasing a sympathy with Favino's character who joins his current gallery of imposing heavy men - Il traditore,  L'ultima notte di Amore. 

The final captions saying that we are seeing a true account makes what has been a naval movie action adventure more compelling. 

Scrape away routine submarine movies – Deep Six, Torpedo Alley, We Dive at Dawn, Submarine Command, Ice Station Zebra and we get to a layer that's substantial and diverse – Morgenrot, Morning Departure, The Bedford Incident, Das boot. This one is not outclassed among them.

Comandante - De Angelis with Favino

Fans of Alba Rowacher's attempts to turn around our expectations of what a film star should be - what a film star should look like - will add director Roberta Torre's Mi fanno male i capelli/In the Mirror to the Rowacher gallery with some interest. Anyone coming at it cold will probably not be so sure.

Korsakoff Syndrome clouds Alba's mind as she is found wandering on the remote beach that fronts the reduced-by-debt home husband Filippo Timi has set up. Old format home movies of a 2009 Thailand holiday, falling flower petals or a shot of a peach with one bite missing gradually add in the details of her life, as she identifies with Monica Vitti (mainly) characters in the old films they print up in black and white clips with Alain Delon and Marcello Mastroianni and inserting mirror reflections of Alberto Sordi. Those elegant glimpses of Vitti's Anonioni movies contrast with Sordi's 1973 Polvere di stelle where the on-screen lion which terrifies the star merges with the stone statue in her yard and TV coverage of a zoo escaper. The ridiculous fantasies and the menace of sold-up property and repercussions for taking away the kid in the cafe to see the composited beast crowd in. Alba transcribing the stars' dialogues into a note book (the title is a Vitti quote about tearing her hair out) joins enacted scenes with Timi and disconcerted diner guests, which now take the place of her memories.

Rowacher - In the Mirror.

Intermittently interesting and another out-of-whack part for the star, this one has minimal connection with Angela and Tanno da morire, the Palermo crime pieces which have represented established writer-director Roberta Torre's work in screenings here. A score by Wong Ka-wai musician Shigeru Umebayashi effectively integrates the nostalgia and realist crazy lady elements. We are curiously close to I Saw the TV Glow where the movie experience invades the world of the lead again.

Simone Godano's Sei Fratelli / Family Matters is a lucky dip film. The reviews are in Italian and the most familiar face has the craggy features of Riccardo Scamarcio (Nanni Moretti's Tre piani). This one proves to be another one of those family reunion pieces we keep on getting from European directors like Arnaud Desplechin

Patriarch Giole Dix is on a hospital morphine drip and, rather than cling to a miserable life, he disconnects it and throws himself over the upper floor railing, bringing to an end his first-person narration which was our best chance of working out what is happening. Turns out he's fathered six – no, seven – now mature offspring from different women and, coming from the European locations they've made their homes, his extended family turn up for the cremation and reading of his will. Old antagonisms surface (of course) and new bonds are forged. Oldest son Scamarcio tries to mediate, only to be rebuked for bad advice. Flakey fry cook Gabriel Montesi is particularly stroppy. Valentina Bellé, the daughter they didn't know about is fresh out of jail after a drug bust and young Mati Gali faces a Scarlatti audition for his crucial music scholarship. The mood isn't lightened by finding out their inheritance is a debt-ridden oyster lease, where the staff are owed nine months back pay. The grown children plan a reconciliation, spreading Dix' ashes on his favorite beach but that isn't a great success, even with spontaneous skinny dipping. Things end up as a drunken night on the town with a turn at the Lazer game parlor.

The most telling touch is their final resolve that the scattered family will reunite.  We learn they will never gather again.

Individual scenes and performances, spaced by glimpses of the Bordeaux setting, get attention but the piece goes on too long and impetus wilts because there's too much now-who-is-this-one-again?  Family Matters ends up being another glimpse at the sea of unknown movie product out there.

More to come...

Barrie Pattison 2024