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