More Italian Film Festival 2025

The 2025 Italian Film Festival became even more remarkable when they fronted the new Paulo Sorrentino- Tony Servillo La grazia.

La Grazie - Servillo.

La grazia opens (surprisingly) effectively with jets distant in a clear sky and captions outlining the duties of the Italian Presidente.  Any viewer will be struck by the lack of connection to the powers the Trump administration has appropriated. However, the film is really apolitical. Long-time Sorrentino collaborator Toni Servillo’s lead character, Mariano De Santis’ ex ex-judge is a President coming to the end of his final term - after surviving five. Italian Presidents are familiar ground for the star and director, who have already made the Silvio Berlusconi biography L’oro and Il divo on Giulio Andreotti but this one leaves those in its dust. In fact, it’s so good that I forgive them for their Il grande belezzia.

Servillo’s major challenge is a decision on three petitions put before him: clemency for two convicted spouse murderers and the legalisation of euthanasia. The grace of the title has the double legal and religious meaning and becomes a central, complex philosophical concept. Now if this sounds heavy, it is but Grazie is not a downer. It is in fact one of the most approachable current productions and its mix of intelligence and superior film craft puts it in the top bracket.

 We catch up with Presidente Tony sneaking a cigarette on the Quirinale Palace roof, though he now has only one lung. His day is arranged round ceremonial events - a meeting with Portugal’s ancient  Prime Minister, whose progress down the red carpet is disrupted by a cloudburst (very A nous la liberté - they liked the same bit I did), a meeting with Alexandra Gottschlichm, the flirtatious Lithuanian ambassador or the lavish La Scala climax performance in his honor.  Attending the Alpini Regimental dinner, where Tony stands up at the head of the table and sings their anthem, had me feeling I should cheer. His dialogue with black Pope friend Rufin Doh Zeyenouin shades into a confession, pointing Tony’s Christian Democrat background.  It’s also a reminder of Sorenntino’s accomplished Young Pope streaming series.

 The character’s private time is spent with lawyer daughter Anna Ferzetti, one of the film’s many clearly talented performers whose work hasn’t come our way.   They share his fish and quinoa meals and we get a hint that taking care of him has consumed half her life, while her musician brother has escaped those demands. The scene where Tony finally decisively edits the assisted suicide petition with Ferzetti, though it will stress his relationship with his Prelate friend, is a nice way of bolstering our regard for the character.

  La grazie - memory

However, all is not well with Tony. He stands unexpectedly at a church service or in a frenetic modern ballet video presentation, inserting him immobile into the furious dancing, (which was the one good idea in Grande bellezia). His prescient Major Domo Orlando Cinque (he carries an inhaler in case Tony gets a cough) is in charge of Elvis (!) the President’s horse which  has failed to respond to care and needs to be put down. Tony’s persistent neurosis is the knowledge that his late wife took a lover, confiding in acid tonged family friend Milvia Marigliano, sworn not to reveal the name. The wife’s silhouette distant in the fog haunts him and  how the film resolves this conflict is nothing short of brilliant.

Also unexpected is the film’s introducing the conflict of popular and classical music, running to rapper Guè Pequeno towering over other recipients at the comic awards presentation and giving Servillo a second change to sing unaccompanied, which he does impressively. The film’s real strength however is a succession of set piece dialogues, particularly those with the jailed petitioners. Ferzetti visits Black Widow Linda Messerklinger only to be insulted but the lawyer meets Messerklinger’s devoted admirer in the commissary. Tony’s investigation of wife-killer Vasco Mirandola proves less intense. Interviewing the convict’s mayor inverts expectation.

 This is part of the film's structure, the thing which would make it outstanding even without the master crafting. What we accept as being part of movie shorthand exposition is subverted. When Tony sees Mirandola in jail, his democratic gesture of refusing the special ante room his daughter had used, finds the prisoners’ waiting relatives as embarrassed as he is. Mirandola dismisses the esteem his pupils had for him, saying he only acted out what was in their text books. What they admired was his performance. Tony telling Marigliano he keeps on sleeping in church, has her dismissing his complaint, saying he’s lucky. It takes her two sleeping pills. The Major Domo prompts that Tony gives too much importance to truth, which Tony, twenty years a judge, finds confronting. After rejecting symbolism for two hours La grazie tracks back to the astronaut who’s tear fell in zero gravity before he broke out in laughter, while Tony watched the live feed from space. 

 La grazie - Servillo.

There’s no doubt that Servillo’s performance confirms his status as the great film actor of our time (he lucks out with The Illusion too). Even when he is immobile, listening or watching the action, he owns the scene. Sorrentino had immense luck in finding him and the actor has pounced on the opportunity their work provides.

The film has been bought by Madman locally and should turn up in theaters shortly. It will be interesting to see if their efforts receive recognition.

Sorrentino filming

It's not all that big a jump to Andrea Segre’s Berlinguer: La grande ambizione/ The Great Ambition, even if this one is closer to a history lesson than an entertainment. Its subject, Enrico Berlinguer headed the Italian Communist Party, during the period in the seventies and eighties, where it was the largest in Europe, finally commanding forty percent of his country’s vote. This is a subject neglected by media and education. Too much of it is embarrassing for them and their support base. Berlinguer managed to tick off both the Soviets and the ruling Christian Democrats with his brand of what they called Euro-Communism,  a balancing act between the opposing camps, holding the line against US Imperialism but wanting Italy in NATO, rather than the Soviet bloc. There is a nice half-comic scene where Berlinguer and the Soviet Premier agree a deal where they won’t publicly criticise the others’ positions. This manouvering gets so much attention that The Party doesn’t seem to be getting stuck into legislation, with fighting the conservatives’ restrictive divorce reform being just about the only thing on show. 

Great Ambition - Elio Germano

However, The Great Ambition does work hard at reaching a wide public. The film fronts Elio Germano impressively  submerging his star persona in the Berlinguer character, first seen narrowly avoiding death in a Bulgarian highway pile-up for which the Soviet authorities are suspected. There’s also a difficult balance between public and private life - Germano gathering his children to warn them that, if he is kidnapped like Aldo Moro, his position, forbidding any deal with extremists, may remove him from their lives. The film is at pains to select unfamiliar support players whose presence doesn’t undermine presenting them as captioned historical figures. There’s enough dramatisation to offer Roberto Citran as a relatable Moro and Nikolay Danchev as a comic Leonid Breznev - a reincarnated Stalin whose mustache has metamorphosed into eyebrows. The Great Ambition gains conviction using the device we saw in Marcel Barrena’s Spanish El 47,  yellowing the tone of the photography so that it matches the 1970s stock footage into which it is integrated - or at least doesn’t jar on transitions. Actuality of the funeral, attended by Marcello Mastroianni and Mickael Gorbachev, gets to be the comment they wanted to make. 

 Andrea Segre’s film manages to hold attention to the extent than an audience which has no stake in events remains interested, something we’ve seen failed often.  It’s welcome to find the director of 2011’s Io sono Li/ Song Le & the Poet back again with another involving but still thoughtful production  

I suspect I’m the only person who ever sought out this one because it fills in the background I’m missing in all those Years of Lead thrillers that make up a significant section of Italian cinema. Include Bellocchio’s 1972 Slap the Monster on Page One, 2007 Good Morning Night & 2022 Exterior Night, Bolognini’s 1972 Chronicle of a Homicide,  Francesco Rosi’s 1976 Illustrious Corpses & 1981 Three Brothers, Damio Damiani’s 1976 I Am Afraid, Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child and Segio Corbucci’s 1991 Women in Arms. Watching those, I've always felt I needed footnotes.

As if to make the point, the event offered Il tempo che ci vuole/The Time It Takes.  One startling scene has pre-teen Anna Mangiocavallo sitting in a class that hears a loud hailer truck announcement of the  Aldo Moro murder from the street below and immediately bursts out in cheers, horrifying their teacher.

The film is Francesca Commencini’s autobiographical account of growing up the daughter of movie director Luigi Comencini (Proibito rubare, Pane, amore e fantasia). It narrows its focus to this central pair. Francesca's mother or her fellow-director sister Christina are curiously absent. Starting with Mangiocavallo as an eight year old on the set of Luigi/Fabrizio Gifuni’s TV Pinocchio series (Giuseppe Lo Piccolo and Luca Massaro  as Franco & Ciccio) we watch her perception of him metamorphose from master & commander of a film making fairy land - on horseback,  a ball of light in his hands - till we reach the pair in his old age, having seen a life time of turbulent history.  

Filmmaking is interlaced with the personal material. Fleeing Red Brigade terror, Gifuni proposes a shift to Paris. The grown Francesca, now Romana Maggiora Vergano, asks what they could do there and is told they will watch movies. This shades into his recollection of being stood up in the city by an early love object and going dejected to a movie house running the Pabst L’Atalantide,  which they mis-quote (that’s Vladimir Sokaloff as Brigite Helm’s father calling out “Paree, Paree!” before the cut to the Can Can dancers in the French version, a moment which also lodged in my own memory bank) 

Vergano & Francesca Comencini

The Time It Takes is exceptionally dense. I'd need another viewing to absorb it fully.  It runs through Neo Realism, the Red Brigade, addiction, tough love, Film Festival glitter, age and infirmity, all with a stylistic complexity that finds room for the motif of the sinister whale red mouth fantasy, the film clips and family dominance that shifts between father and daughter as she is engulfed by the drug scene and age takes his stamina. 

Francesca, determined to make her own films, announces an autobiographical project and her father comments that in a long career he never felt that need himself and forbids her to show him the result. He sits watching her subsequent award presentation, directing her TV image from his chair.  

Performances are excellent. Use of the actual family home adds another connection and the technical work, with Luca Bigazzi again impressive on camera, effectively slots the piece between documentary and romanticised memory. The ending is quite magical, merging Helm's backward glance and the flying whale. Film clips (include a silent Pinocchio & Paisa again) are made tellingly relevant with the final revelation that they come from the copies that a then young enthusiast Luigi hoarded under his bed after they were abandoned by their holders, later to present to the Milan Cinematheque, of which he was a founder.

The Time It Takes is exceptionally dense. I'd need another viewing to absorb it fully.  It runs through Neo Realism, the Red Brigade, addiction, tough love, Film Festival glitter, age and infirmity, all in a stylistic complexity that finds room for the motif of the sinister whale red mouth fantasy, the film clips and dominance that shifts between father and daughter as she is engulfed by the drug scene and age takes his stamina. The film is unsparing and frequently touching. One particularly effective passage has Gifuni describe his coming to terms with the fact that his efforts in the area he loved were largely mediocre. I recalled an interview with grindhouse specialist Fred Olen Ray describing the same realisation - we are into strange comparisons. I found it hard to find a match for this one. The Barrets of Wimpole Street would be a grotesque choice. Ann Hui’s mother-daughter Song of the Exile comes closer. 

The Time It Takes is a film that I hope gets wider showing, not just because it connects with me on a quite alarming number of levels but because I feel it communicates the movie experience probably better than anything else I can recall.

On Diamanti director Ferzan Özpetek is back working with colleagues from twenty years ago, when his Ignorant Fairies was big (Stefano Accorsi, cameraman Gian Filippo Corticelli) and faults from that period persist and accelerate here. The polished, movement-full texture drawss attention and Luisa Parthenope Ranieri’s all-women theatrical fashion house looks like a promising setting. Unfortunately what we get is a portmanteau of soapy sub plots as we come to know the personnel - the Ocar-winning designer, who feels she has lost her touch,  withdrawn son, abused wife, the memory of a dead nephew, failed performer channelling all her energies into the kitchen, the demonstrator-niece hiding out in the workshop where she just happens to reveal a superior fashion sense and (give me a break) the driving force who never overcame being left in the rain by her lover at the station in Paris. Anna Ferzetti is in this one too, along with Jasmine Trinka and Milena Vukotic no less.

Diamanti - Smutniak

It’s not the performers. It’s the dumb material they are given. However, there is one stand-out. It is telegraphed the first time they spread the scarlet fabric on the workbench. The crunch is the dress which glamorous Kasia Smutniak has to wear in the key final scene of the production they are pouring all this effort into it. Several of the plot lines converge on this and there is the feeling that whatever they come up with will be an anti-climax. No way. They nail that one. On its own, that pretty much makes Diamanti worth wading through.

Follemente/Somebody to Love shows the hand of director Paolo Genovese, the creator of the twenty-five times foreign versioned Perfect Strangers. Several of the performers from that one turn up again and we get more contemporary sex politics. Here in the place of a gay coming out, it’s feminist promptings - Frida Karlo cushion covers and "Who the fuck is Carla Lonzi?”  

 Edoardo Leo with his bunch of flowers sets out for his date at Pilar Fogliati’s flat, where she is flustered at trying to get the meal and the illumination right. From street level, he is puzzled by lights blinking in her upstairs window.   

Follemente - Leo & Fogliati.

However this time we are nodding to Inside Out. In an in-joke, which would have been lost on viewers, Fogliati did the voice for one of the characters in the Italian dub of that one. We become privy to the inner workings of the leads' minds where their character traits are visualised as the support cast play their operating in suitable guy and girl surroundings, analysing and barracking the stars’ decisions. 

Actually personifying the leads’ multiple emotions on screen goes back further than Pixar, with Johnny To’s 2007 San taam/Mad Detective or, if you’re really digging, the strip cartoon adventures of Buck Rogers in the Twenty First Century, who the evil scientist sent off leading a group of all his cloned personalities.

Here they get quite some mileage out of the this tricky structure - Fogliati’s lot cheering to discover that the mother of the daughter who ‘phones Leo is his “ex” or turning simultaneously accusing on their romantic member, when someone asks who introduced dogs into the conversation. This goes with the cut to all the Leo members desperately working their shelves of system cards as he tries to come up with the right word to reassure her. The glimpse of his team, seen though the door spy hole by her thinks people, as they pile back, goes with the scene of the support joining in the title song together. Then there’s the round of applause when Edoardo decides to go down on her. We didn’t get that in Inside Out.

The charm of the co-stars comes with the director’s best comic touch and superior production values to make this presentable date night movie stuff.

Remembering that Director Alessandro Genovesi's 10 Giorni con i suoi is a second sequel to a re-make of Ariel Winograd's 2017 Argentiean  Mamá se fue de viaje/ Ten Days Without Mom, you've got to give  it credit. The characters are still involving and enough of the jokes land sufficiently well to get laughs. 

The new production, now trading as When Mum Is Away ... With the In-Laws, finds dad Fabio De Luigi again heading up his growing family. Daughter Angelica Elli has achieved college age and wants to go live with her student boy friend Gabriele Pizzurro while studying.  To ease mistrusts, the kids' parents Giulia Bevilacqua and Dino Abbrescia  propose sharing a holiday at their sunny Apulian farm house. Complicating matters mum Valentin Lodovoni is pregnant again at 45 and not sure about telling Fabio. 

Not all the plot elements shake out. We could have seen more of the wolf that shows up snarling. Recruiting De Luigi to play Christ in the local passion play, complete with a priest who's into scourging is pushing their luck, like Fabio crushing the kid brother-in-law's year-long Lego project and suspicion that Pizzurro maye be getting some action on the side. However Bevilacqua proves a real find - moments like her adoringly comparing her pot-bellied spouse to Poseidon, as he emerges dripping from the family pool. The sub plot of the youngest children losing patience with the oldies' antics and packing a tent to take to the shore,  connects both with their families and the audience. Not interrupting their first kiss gets the intended sympathy.

This one is an agreeable enough Italian comedy. It's easy to understand why it cleaned up on its home turf.

 The event's idea of a retrospective was a run of giallo thrillers. Normally I'd be on board with that - the cinema bis & Drive Ins of the seventies. Once, with a single night in Paris and three hundred films to  chose from, I'd homed in on Dario Argento's splendidly bonkers Profondo Rosso, which turns up again here. 

The one I hadn't seen was Sergio Martino's Tutti i colori del buio / All the Colours of the Dark/ Day of the Maniac, which proved an incoherent mystery. It opens with a clumsy attempt at a surreal dream sequence (big close-up of eyes, laughing woman in doll outfit, knife plunged in gut - all on limbo background) supposed to tell us that fleshy Signorina Edwige Fenech is in shock after losing a baby and being involved in a car crash. We are suspicious of her pharmaceutical salesman husband George Hilton, who is treating her with some blue liquid. (“You didn’t take your pills again”) Everywhere she goes, sinister Ivan Rassimov, in clumsy blue contact lenses, is watching. Edwige's sister, Nieves Navarro recommends seeing badly dubbed Dr. Jorge Rigaud but Marina Malfatti, the neighbour in their massive housing project, drives our heroine off to a castle, where open robe cult leader Julián Ugarte wears a medalion in the form of the cabbalist eye in triangle symbol, which is tattooed on his followers. This palely anticipates Eyes Wide Shut.

Turns out that Malfatti has become world weary (or something) but can’t leave the cult until someone replaces her. Given the dagger that killed her mother (!) Fenech dispatches her. Hilton reappears and may or may not be complicit and cops with cult tattoos carry off Fenech during a maximum of finding slashed bodies and non-scaring jump scares. The real Scotland Yard surfaces belatedly and there’s a slack rooftop chase and rather better use of the housing’s sinister lift well.

     All the Colours of the Night - Fenech

Best element is Bruno Nicolai’s score, which at least reminds us it’s a giallo. There’s the odd piece of show-off camera - the 'Scope frame accommodating two close-ups, anticipating our heroine's three-face mirror. Familiar from other Euro trash slasher films, skin flicks and westerns, the cast are wooden while all the fashion mannequin women get to appear in (or out of) low cut outfits. Plot developments usually make no particular sense, like the use of London setting represented by wide shots of the block of flats, black Diesel cabs and panoramas of Thames bridges.

This one was run in a sub-titled digital transfer of the 35mm. original and for once might have been more acceptable in the English language version, The’re Coming to Get You. It threw into relief the quality entries.  

As usual, doing the whole event was too expensive and time-consuming but I did particularly regret missing the new Gianni Amélio Campo di battaglia. So much quality film in a short period was on the way to being indigestible and was another reminder of the need for a National Cinémathèque - as if we needed another reminder. 

 

Barrie Pattison - 2025

 

 

            

 

Italian Film Festival 2025.

Diamanti

When I had access to the European multiplexes, I used to wonder why the films I saw there were better than the ones that arrived in festivals - with a small overlap and a few exceptions. The answer wasn't all that hard to work out. The films were in theatres on the basis of their earning power while festival choices were made by critics, who might be nice people, kind to small animals and always remembering their mothers' birthdays, but had to  focus on material that would impress their editors or showed they shared their readers' preferences and prejudices. Paying customers were a surer guide than arbiters of taste.

It all comes back at the current Italian Film Month, which puts up a strong (so far) selection of current hits. It’s getting hard to pick the best entry but Gabriele (Mediteraneo) Salvatores’ Napoli-new york/ Naples to New York has got to be in there with a chance. 

They don’t waste any time, opening with an undetected WW2 bomb obliterating a Neapolitan terrace occupied by locals who had no other shelter. Young Dea Lanzaro staggers out of the dust unharmed but next morning in hospital she sees the aunt, her only caregiver, die of her injuries. The girl escapes attention to share a building site hideaway with orphan Antonio Guerra, who barely supports himself cheating at Mazetta card games and selling cigarettes to the Americans who are now abandoning the city. However a U.S. ship is in the harbor and Guerra makes off with a row boat ferrying sailors ashore, to transport black cook Omar Benson Miller - who is having a good year with this one and Sinners.

One of the successive set-piece scenes has the kids trapped on the departing naval vessel, spoiling purser again imposing Pierfrancesco Favino’s record in detecting clandestines. They find the ship’s three communities - the seamen, the white clothed first class passengers and the wretched Italians in steerage. Given a bunk below decks,  the kids face one menacing sailor who advances on them to be warned off with a fork held at his throat. He proves to want to offer them a chocolate bar. After a voyage where they make themselves useful, the stowaways awake to the wonder of Lady Liberty outside a porthole, looking like the Madonna of Pompeii rising from the mist. Hard drinking Captain Tomas Arana makes them Favino’s problem and he conspires with Miller to smuggle the pair ashore. When the packing case where they are confined opens, they are in New York. Lanzaro knows her sister has already gone there to marry and tries to find her using the photo that is her most valued possession. Anyone remember Stephen Low’s 1995 IMAX film Across the Sea of Time?

The impact of the city with its hoardings, markets, Little Italy’s Saint Gennaro festival and Times Square Movie House bright lights foyers, is as mesmerising to the audience as it is to the kids. Separation makes Lanzaro desperate but Favino and Miller come back into the narrative (somewhat uneasily) as Favino’s home life with the striking Anna Ammirati takes a central place. The missing sister arrives as a mug shot in a discarded newspaper. Soon it's Defense Lawyer Anton Alexander reading the 1912 Xenophobic newspaper rant to a courtroom where Miller, limited to the blacks’ upper gallery, begins a round of applause, prompting calls for clearing the court. Women's Lib arrives a few decades too early but it's only a movie, Ingrid. Naples to New York manages to mix damp-eyed family material with sinister melodrama and becomes curiously topical with its U.S.immigrant deportation subject. 

The film buts one highlight onto another and sets them in an extraordinary movie world. Tempting food  adds another sense dimension to events -  Ammirati's cooking, the seeded bread roll the black teenager gives the starving girl, the luxury chocolate cake the pair steal. There are remarkable pieces of effects work - the reflection of the duo that the camera inverts to show them standing in the street. A subject that starts with a building exploding, funnels down to a card game, without any sense of anticlimax.  

It’s curious to see the Naples dockland again so soon after finding Luigi Comencini’s 1948 Proibito rubare on YouTube and the film makes its own comparison running the clip of Paisa, where they tell us we can see Guerra on screen. Indeed Naples to New York’s trick is putting up its own version of scenes we recognise from other movies - Death In Venice, The Ship Sails On, Once Upon a Time in America and notably The Brutalist, where the Ellis Island footage there is totally outclassed. We get a mix of actual locations (cafe tables have appeared on those garment district loading docks) and striking art department simulations. Jimmy Durante or Tom Waites doing "West Side Story" are among the period tracks that back the action. While this one has moved away from its origins, an unfilmed script by Fellini and Tullio Penelli, there are constant Fellini echoes  -  Miller smuggling an unexplained live leopard, a vice quarter with picturesque whores.

Naples to New York - Lanzaro, Guerra, Favino & Salvatores

The excellence of this one prompts me on all those other Salvatores films I’ve never managed to see, even  importing DVDs and putting in work on ethnic sources. Well what do I expect in a country that hasn’t had a Cinémathèque for fifty years.

Also contending for top honors, we get Roberto Andò's L'abbaglio/The Blunder/The Illusion, another superior effort from his 2022 Stranezza team, where comics  Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone also flanked Tonino Servillo, there as Luigi Pirandello. The new film is another of their Sicilian subjects, acknowledging writer Leonardo Sciascia. This time, they start with the duo as Franco & Ciccio and end with them as Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains, while Servillo registers imperiously.

Opening has ex-Bourbon Colonel Tony recruiting for his 1860 campaign to take Palmero for Garibaldi’s Risorgimento forces. Among the volunteers (father & teenage son, etc.) are Sicilians Ficcara & Piccone. Tony figures that even a coward may come in useful.

Turns out card sharp Ficarra is using the expedition as transport to get him back to the fiancée he hasn’t seen for years and, when the (0K model ships) landing comes under fire, the two leads are the only ones to break ranks and make a run for it, sheltering in the same cave. The duo come to terms with their mutual contempt and, after collecting a blast of buckshot in one’s rump when they try to steal from a clothes line, they find shelter in a nunnery by representing themselves as a deaf mute and his carer. Lively young sister Giulia Andò takes an interest and her older, card-playing supervisor is soon losing the returns scooped off from the plate to the newcomers. The leafy maze gardens seem like paradise but their cover is soon blown and they are expelled in an overhead shot of swarming black & white robe nuns.

The Illusion - Ficarra & Picone with Tony Servillo  - wide angle distorted.

They are recaptured by the Garibaldi forces, to Col. Tony’s disgust - not worth a couple of bullets, His armed barricade has repelled the Bourbon troops and the comics are put in charge of lugging the one field piece, to be mounted on the hill fortress. They consider dumping it and taking off but, seeing the grey coats on the opposite slope, they manage to make it fire, all but missing the advance but putting a scare into the enemy, who scamper back down the hill to escape. 

Tony scorns the welcome offered by the rural Communists and Mafia people and Tommaso Ragno’s Garibaldi comes up with a desperate plan where Tony will take a doomed column in a feint that will make Pascal Gregory’s command think the Garibaldi forces are still in the area, while he marches on Palermo, where Tony’s mother still lives. Servillo cuts a distinguished figure on the horse he rides there on a secret visit.

The Bourbons sack and burn one town, which they believe sheltered their enemies but the village, where now ex-sister Andò is once more a resident, still welcomes the grey coats, offering to care for their wounded in the homes. They now face a similar fate. Seen from the hillside loo window, the royalists seem as numerous as the ants that swarm there. Servillo’s tiny force prepares a doomed resistance but in a great twist climax it is the Sicilians who save the day - even if we were expecting a battle.

It’s visibly scaled-down spectacle runs to scrubbed historic buildings, the beachhead scattering troops on the sand or the overwhelming opposing column reduced to Servillo's  telescope-masked view. The modest production values still make a presentable show case for the great performances & script. Pouring Verdi over things rounds out the impact. A class act, this one.

A coda shows the now unified country, where Servillo's search for the pair takes him to the secret gambling house, to be welcomed with whores and a glass of absinthe. There, he sees elegantly presented Andò doing the My Darling Clemantine signals routine behind players' backs. Tony sits down at the table. This is the second exceptional movie in the event that ends with a crooked card game.

Determinedly Sicilian and again fronting busy Tony Servillo is IDDU/Sicilian Letters from Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, who have been over this ground before with the 2017 Sicilian Ghost Story, which also dealt with a supergrass and the mafia - that one more successfully managing its suspense elements and high culture references. "Faith begins when reason ends."

Sicilian Letters - Servillo.

In this one, straggly haired  Profesore Tony ends a jail term, which has stripped away his authority as a teacher, an official, a Mafia capo and a husband. Fausto Russo Alesi's Secret Police swoop on him as their way to track the last of the island's Honorable Society notables to elude them, Elio Germani's hidden heir to the criminal enterprise. A window of opportunity opens for Tony to regain his standing by manipulating the situation to bring to life his derelict luxury hotel project.

Germani has been hidden by a now mature Barbara Bobulova (who it's nice to see still a glamorous presence). Even his access to daylight has been imperiled by her neighbor's home improvements. Servillo's influence as a father figure is bait in a trap. This is getting unclear and uninvolving. An odd alliance forms between sullen police woman Daniela Marra and Tony but the cops and robbers are both smarter than they are.  Messages are exchanged in plastic-wrapped letters tucked into fishmonger stock. Craft aspects and cast are fine but the film lacks the conviction of the team's earlier Sicilian melo. It takes a while to connect the shock opening, cutting the goat's throat to the intrigue. The final exposition bewails the corruption of Sicilian society but attention has wandered by then. 

 Fuori is very much a vehicle for Valeria Gollino, who has been a welcome contributor to popular film for decades. Respiro, Portrait of a Lady on Fire - and Big Top Peewee. They make her character fifty five in director Mario Martone's new Fuori and introduce her being strip-searched for her induction to Rebibbia prison. They want us to know this one's not trivia.  

Fuori - De Angelis, Golino, Elodie.

The film is an adaptation of the autobiographical Novel by  Goliarda Sapienza, who they assure us is one of the important writers of our time. Golino has made a TV series of  Sapienza's The Art of Joy. In broken time sequence, we follow the character's imprisonment for the theft of her sister's jewellery. No miscarriage of justice here - we see her stuff the loot into her pantyhose at a party. Our heroine's not going to take any shit and there she is punching it out with a younger inmate, while the other prisoners chant "Fuori!" The action flashes forward and backwards (one neat change in screen shape indicates a time shift insert) and gradually her relationship with (current hot star prospect) Matilda De Angelis moves into central position. There is one striking passage where Gollino initiates a threesome in Elodie's perfume shop's hidden shower, which is bound to be the thing for which the film is remembered. 

It is only in the final rail station meeting with De Angelis, that provides her with a suitcase of contraband jail letters, that the shape of the work really emerges - with end captions to provide the information that someone who isn't familiar with Sapienza's status needs to access. Performances are superior and the filming, in what looks like genuine locations, is often handsome but Fuori is demanding. Just following events is hard work.

Le assaggiatrici / The (Food)tasters has been here before. It gets this double dip as an Italy, Belgium, Switzerland co-production, arriving in its German-speaking edition.

Director Silvio Soldini was responsible for the engaging Bread and Tulips and Days and Clouds. In this one, it's November 1943, the start of the decline of WW2 Germany,  Twenty six year old, freshly married and city-raised Elisa Schlott (Das boot 2022) seeks refuge from hostilities with her in-laws at rural Gross-Partsch, East Prussia  - since become Poland. However there is a mysterious installation in the nearby woods. It turns out that the Wolfschanze, the Führer's secret refuge, has been constructed there. We never see Hitler, which is a bit like a pantomime without a demon king, but his movements are effectively signaled by his special train pulling in and leaving. 

  Tasters- Elisa Schlott

A seven women team is recruited from healthy, young, local Germans to act as Hitler's foodtasters. The ambiguous chef offers  the prospect of epicure vegetarian meals in a time of scarcity and dismisses poisoning as being another risk of the war. There is a burst of activity when one of the group vomits after eating her portion of a food item, with suspicions of complicity in an assassination plot. 

A variety of backgrounds and motivations are revealed among the Fräuleins. One is of course a concealed Jew. Tension is accelerated when strict officer Max Riemelt (Kate Shortland's Berlin Syndrome), brought from the front, is put in charge. Against character, he and Schlott make secret rendezvous in the family barn. This is not going to turn out well.

Celebrity Swiss cameraman Renato Berta's desaturated images add conviction and performances are superior but it's all too grim.

More shortly.

Illusion -  Ficarra & Picone 

Barrie Pattison - 2025

The Heir to William S. Hart.

In the Australia of my childhood, the Saturday afternoon movie crowd was short-changed - at least in the urban centers where the exchanges must have thought they were dealing with sophisticated tinies. The series cowboy movies that were a signal element of the American experience hardly ever surfaced. Sure, we got (and treasured) Hoppy and (less so) Roy Rogers or the Durango Kid but their precursors, Ken Maynard, Col. Tim McCoy, Buck Jones and the rest, were all but unknown. When they surfaced in the VHS era I realised that an essential element of my cinema experience was missing. About then, I also discovered that John Ford spent his declining years peering at these, because they matched his taste, as well as being made by his old chums. 

I was reminded of that sense of having missed out when  Buck Jones' 1933 Thrill Hunter surfaced on Youtube. The remarkably sharp & clear copy got my attention straight off, looking as if it had been struck directly off an impeccable Gail Films negative, Columbia fanfare playing under their re-issue title.

Thrill Hunter is not one of the best of Buck Jones efforts. His great stone face, which is perfect at being the hard man cowboy, can’t manage the jokey compulsive liar character that Wally Beery in This Man’s Navy or Richard Dreyfus in The Big Fix nail with ease - add all the Baron Munchausens or Willy Whopper. However this one has an edge on most of the series westerns in using a half way A feature crew. Busy director George Seitz (the great silent The Vanishing American or the Andy Hardys), cameraman Ted Tetzlaff (later to direct The Window and Riff Raff/The Amazing Mr. Hammer) and editor Gene Milford  (Lost Horizon, On the Waterfront) are punching below their weight. They pounce on opportunities, like the plane buzzing a car at the rail Station, and produce a sequence that would be fine in a major production.

For the rest, the nonentities do as they are told. Revier makes a plausible movie heroine. Buck, first seen in an argument with ever typecast cook Willy Fung, who never speaks a word of English in this one, rescues her from a runaway when her unit is scouting locations for a production. (“give a horse his head. he’ll slow down pretty soon”) He’s invited to dinner with the Motion Picture People and spins them tall tales. (“You mean you flew for the Chinese?”) Riding back, he sees the end of a shootout, that leaves two quarreling bank bandits dead, and he takes credit for downing the pair.  (this plot gets re-cycled in the great 1964 Chicken episode of Gunsmoke) Buck is feted by the State Bankers Association in a nice outdoor ceremony and donates the reward money to build a swimming pool for the grateful community.

On-screen director, Ed leSaint sees him as someone to appear opposite Revier in their new picture. This moves Buck into the expected dramas. Got up in Wardrobe’s fancy braided outfit, he is ridiculed by the cowboy extras and has a fight with them. He does drive on the racing circuit (though the crash footage is library ) and begs off early from his night with Revier at the Hollywood Ritz to try to work out how to fly an airplane on a carnival gimble. These appear to be the only stunts he actually does, outside that nice rapid mount on Silver in the opening.

Our hero’s inability to manage the plane exposes his deceit and he’s sent on his way by all, including Revier, who he’s unknowingly given the locket with the map of the hiding place for the bank loot. He finds himself with hobos in an imposing-looking train but the production doesn’t get any value out of that. The writing is pretty lazy, putting him in the same rail freight car as the rest of the robbers, who make off with a car they claim has been sent to pick up Revier. Buck appropriates a dodgy plane that the owner can’t get started and takes to the sky (the impressive flying footage) in pursuit, shooting it out and surviving an OK crash before the Happy End, where he swears to give up falsehood - in vain.

Not exactly cerebral and short of the celebrity support that often prop up these - think Ward Bond, Wallace McDonald, John Wayne or Walter Brennan - but for a one hour B western, plenty OK. Jones had considerable control on some of these and it's easy to see him as the heir to William S. Hart, striking a nice balance between pulp adventure and plausibility. Me, I wish I'd found him when I was still part of his target audience.

 

Thrill Hunter - Revier, Jones, Robert Ellis, Harry Semels.


Barrie Pattison 2025.

Rage & Reason - André Cayatte

The fifties are represented as a golden age for French film, the period of La nouvelle vague, when filmmakers in their twenties could get up a feature film with comparative ease and have it widely admired. A dominant proportion had been “Children of the Cinémathèque”, critics sitting next to their mates at Langlois’ screenings. They were going to get attention in the influential serious movie magazines of the day. With Francois Truffaut, who was leading the charge, married to a producer’s daughter, the path became even smoother. 

Truth was that veteran French stars, writers and directors were often flagging - Gabin & Daniele Darieux in La verité sur Bébé Dongé anyone? They were an easy knock off.

 Claude Autant-Lara, who was shaping up for distinguished veteran status (Le diable au corps, Le traversé de Paris) published a sharp letter about the contempt with which his generation was treated, leaving him stuck with a lumpen sex comedy like La jument verte. This was the situation which would be repeated with the Chinese Fifth Generation. People who had been waiting for their moment suddenly found it had passed.

Another casualty was anyone like myself, who had been relishing the work of Autant-Lara,  Henry George Clouzot, René Clement, André Cayatte and a few more, who now found they were missing in action. I revere Agnes Varda but really - how many times does anyone need to see Cléo 5 a 7?

Though the career articles and retrospectives, which sustain reputations, were nowhere to be found, there was still a tradesman’s entrance. Clouzot, Autant Lara, Duvivier and (sort of) René Clair were recruited to knock out vehicles for their industry’s great star - Brigitte Bardot. Also consider the case of popular writer Sébastien Japrisot, whose contribution added box office clout to Costa Gavras’ Compartiment tueurs, René Clement’s Passenger dans la pluie,  Jean Herman’s Adieu l’ami and Anatol  Litvak’s The Girl in the Car, With the Glasses & the Gun - kind of like a sharper James Hadley Chase.

Consider particularly André Cayatte, who was variously a lawyer, a journalist, a filmmaker and a polemicist, these sometimes mixed in ways where the seams vanished. He mastered his director's film craft starting in wartime French Boulevard features - a couple of Tino Rossi musicals, the Middle Version of Au bonheur des dames and (better) Les amants de Veronne from a Jacques Prévert script. His endangered youth movies Justice est fait and Avant le déluge were an indication of the more serious work of which the impressive anti-capital punishment Nous sommes tous des assassins remains his peak achievement. This would be followed by films as imposing as Le Passage du Rhin, Les Risques du métier, the Annie Girardot Il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu & Mourir d'aimer, along with Le Verdict with stellar leads Jean Gabin & Sophia Loren. They were spaced by often misjudged efforts, though Les chemins de Khatmandu (Jane Birkin on the hippy trail) was enjoyably preposterous, Barbara Streisand liked La miroir a deux faces enough to do it over in English, and the better, two-part Jean-Marc et Françoise ou la vie conjugale resurfaced as Divorce His / Divorce Hers. I rated myself a fan and sought out the director's work, though its subtitled distribution was gappy.

  André Cayatte.  

I’m plunged back into that world by finding a nice (even with the odd flash) disk of Cayatte’s 1965 hit La piège pour Cendrillon/A Trap for Cinderella, a polished, original, noirish suspense piece, with one of Japrisot’s perverse twisty plots classed up with sharp dialogue by then-admired Playwright Jean Anouilh (“L’alouette”, “Becket”). Coming directed by the creator of Nous sommes tous des assassins, hopes were high.

 In La Piège pour Cendrillon, the heir to a shoe-making fortune has been killed in a fire, survived by her lookalike companion and one-time playmate. Both are played by not-quite-stellar Dany Carrel. This is made more sinister by placing the remaining burn scarred girl in the care of the heir's vicious lesbian secretary, Madeleine Robinson. 

 

Piège Pour Cendrillion - Carrell

Flashbacks fill in preceding events. Dany the companion was living in poverty, doing the books in Robert Dalban’s parking garage, and involved with worker lover Jean Gaven. Dany, the heiress goes through the motions of rescuing her but is mainly intent on humiliating the girl - with a bit of wrestling in itsy-bitsy bikinis thrown in. Both find themselves involved with the other’s admirers.

The way it's made is impressive - Armand Thirard’s gleaming Black and white wide screen photography, mirrors, elevator cages, material where it's not clear whether they are in studio or location interiors - impeccable split screen - until you notice that they keep on putting cushions in the middle of the shot to get a clean matte line and the camera is always locked down when there are two of Dany on screen. She was always decorative. This is probably her most demanding role and she gives her all but I can't help feeling that wearing revealing outfits - or taking them off - was her special skill. Robinson and Gaven show up the others.  

As with the other Japrisot movies, it pivots on another enigma that I'm not all that curious about. We never see the fire and we sit there thinking we’ve outguessed the writers on the identity of its survivor. A key plot contributor shows up at the last minute to further complicate expectations.

Like Girl in the car With the Glasses & the Gun, there's a recent remake of this one  - with Tuppence Middleton. I wonder about that. There’s also a Russian TV series with the same name, which acknowledges no connection.

My curiosity revived, I went looking for the other missing Cayatte movies. YouTube, my number one source, produced a list but closer examination revealed these to be mainly trailers or TV discussion clips. The only complete films were Justice est fait, which I didn't much like when I had an old sixteen millimeter print and 1978's La Raison d’état in a quite good copy, with subtitles only on material set in Italy, which they had translated into French - just as well, as my Italian is even rougher than my French.

We are coming to the end of André Cayatte with this handsomely mounted A Feature. It immediately gets our sympathy with an Edmond Rostand quote - "If the money spent on armaments went to medicine, we would all live to 120 and have youth for 90 years."

La raison d’état is another of its maker’s message pieces, lining up with the anti-war content of his (better) Le Passage du Rhine. Government Minister Jean Yanne is first seen being waved through by the gendarmes outside the palace, where his discreet honours ceremony is being conducted - no more than a hundred guests. His triumph is a massive arms deal placing munitions with a (fictional) African country, despite legal prohibitions. However, François Périer, the scruffy editor of a French Pacifist journal, is on his case and has assembled an incriminating dossier, which includes photos of crated munitions with official French SNR stencils being unloaded at the African airport.

Périer has an ally in Italian physicist Monnica Vitti, who makes a duplicate of his research, anticipating the intervention of Yanne’s enforcers and, sure enough, after the briefing with Michel Bouquet in Yanne’s private pistol range and a scene driving in Paris traffic, where Yanne in his open roof limo, listens to his opponent's phone call, action shifts to the motorway. Cars box in Périer's old Renault and force it off the road and down a cliff - disturbingly plausible Remy Julienne stunt work with full-size vehicles. In the wrecked car, with Périer’s body, the drivers place a substitute for the damning file

This leaves the question of Vitti’s copy -and the heart of the film. Yanne has her taken into custody and conducts the session in person. The film’s best passages are those between the two stars alone. Yanne, notably a comic performer, manages his shift into imposing and Vitti is right in her element, rounding her anguished Twentieth Century woman. He lays out temptations which rapidly move to four hundred million dollars - an Island Villa, a New York Penthouse - against her confronting the opposition of La Gouvernement de France. He breaks out newspapers headlined with hostile stories of her as a foreign agent and outlines the hollowness of any success - “ We will be replaced by others ... You will be attacked by the Unions when munitions factories close.”  We are doing Christ in the Desert here.

When her two-day Guarde a Vue expires, Monica turns to young associate Jean-Claude Bouillon for protection but he is left beaten in the gutter by the grim-faced security detail that takes her away.

This segment does communicate the “grand peur” that it describes but eventually the film is minor. The red-tinted montages of warfare and the depiction of corruption at the highest level, as board rooms of suits, opposed only by bearded hippies with a movable type printing press, all lack conviction. A guest- shot by the admirable Jesse Hahn, as the obligatory C.I.A. agent, doesn’t help. The reappearance of Cendrillon's incriminating chloroform is more effective. Raisons d’État was pretty much Cayatte’s last major production. I hadn't heard of it, despite its ambitions and my interest.

The film does retain interest as a snapshot of serious European film in an era some of us remember intensely but seen now, the clunky surveillance technique and locating inserts (a silver helicopter catches the sun as it flies past the Twin Towers) date the film and erode its courage and relevance. We can’t help remembering that this all anticipates the  Railbow Warrior affair.  Today we live uneasily in a period where the  Macron government seems to be the one sane voice in World Affairs and André Cayatte is largely forgotten. I don't see too much comfort in that.

Are We All Murderers?

Barrie Pattison