From Lanthimos to Costanzo, from Polanski to Corine, the cinema of the greats once again illuminates the Lido exhibition.
– Something moved Venice?
– Here I am! After a slow start over the past few days, the cinema has once again shone its own light on the screens of the Lido. Friday scored four strokes with a bang, what is more, what is less.
– Where do you want to start?
– I’m going in order of viewing. At 8:30, after only three hours of sleep (here, on the Lido, not only to watch movies…), I was in the audience for “Poor Man” Yorgos Lanthimos, an acclaimed author and a modern complex that fortunately manages to maintain complete freedom of expression, along with ambitions confirmed by awards and successes, to reach a large, educated and demanding audience. After the happy outcome of “Favorites”, presented in Venice in 2018, he brought to the exhibition in the Lido this “Believe the Creature!”, written, like the previous film, by pyrotechnician Tony McNamara. It’s a gothic tale for grown-ups (“Something like Frankenstein leaning towards femininity,” as someone said and wrote), full of nudity, sex, and lots and lots of caustic and obscene irony, which in Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name he found a very fertile source of phantasmagoric pictorial inventions for the imaginary reconstruction of the interiors and exteriors of authentic European cities and capitals of the 19th century, the theater of action (London, Lisbon, Paris …), so inventive for bold and happy flourishing of details that one vision is not enough, to the eye, constantly demanding direction and quality of filming, which is further cured and improved (welcome back, zoom!) in comparison to the famous baroque style of the creator of “Lobster” and “Sacrifice of the Sacred Deer”. Well, these “Poor things” are really a feast for the eyes (by the way , Emma Stone did not spare herself, showing herself without embarrassment in front of the camera) and for the ears, and most importantly, she succeeds in an enterprise that seemed impossible to finally archive, replacing Tim Burton and his entire universe of Halloween trinkets with respectable decor. However, it should be noted during viewing a significant slowdown, followed by a sharp drop in interest in the long central chapter, which, of course, harms the final overall assessment of the work, lowering it by several votes. But I would not speak of a “step back”, because even more than the miracle of the sets and costumes, I was surprised by the evolution of the cinematic creativity of the author, always oriented towards renewal, each time surpassing himself. his own creative career in the modern world.
“Good start to the day, that’s all.”
– What followed without interruption (the schedule here at the Lido includes showings even thirty minutes apart) was a real lightning strike, which I did not expect. Actually I was afraid of it Xavier Costanzo, of which I greatly appreciated the very first “Private” and above all “Hungry Hearts” (and even more so “The Solitude of Prime Numbers”), we would have had to abandon it after the TV move. Instead, unlike other young actors who, after their debut on the big screen, found in the “small”, as they once said, the right dimension for their more moderate talents, here he returned to the cinema after 9 years with a bold film. and the masculine “Finally Alba”, which cost almost 30 million euros (how much can he return, given his very author’s version, which is light years from what he now planned and re-educated public taste in the era of platform and seriality? In fact almost everyone turns up their nose at the Lido…). I consider it a grave mistake to see us, as many of those I hear and read claim, as “tributes” to our cinema of the 50s and 60s, “Lo Sceicco bianco” and “La Dolce vita”. The environment is no doubt similar to Chinechitta, a daily paid extra in American Peplums, and the main character belongs to one of those “matriarchal” families (far from patriarchy!) of the time, where mothers were the “head”. the family unit with which they had much more than working fathers, busy away from home from dawn until late at night, constant contact and communication. The first to speak out in a stormy tirade at the end of the tragic neo-realist film shown in cinemas with her daughters, very critical of the heavy and gloomy turn taken by the Italian cinema of those distant years, is actually the mother. It is she who has already chosen a boyfriend for the younger and less spectacular of her two daughters (the older, busier and more spectacular, sooner or later someone will find him alone), and it is she who gives them permission to go to auditions for one of the many historical films that at that time crowds of actors, actresses and directors were drawn straight from Hollywood to Rome. But in the story of the wild night, the real and real Mimosa (the perfect Rebecca Antonachi, about whom we hope to hear more in the future), was dragged first to the set in the extras, and then to the party. in a country aristocratic villa honoring the American cast of The Basques, populated by a colorful fauna of real and fake movie stars, failed artists, fallen nobles and swine politicians, there is nothing nostalgic, nothing that evokes fond memories of the “good old days” animated by ingenuity and hope. On the contrary, everything is ambiguous, muddy, overshadowed by an unpleasant mistrust. In contrast to the large-scale and crowded scene of a duel in bright sunlight, resulting in the death of warriors in front of the pharaoh, and the torture of captives stripped by falcons in Colossal, set in ancient Egypt (also bathed in blinding light reflected by desert sand, in which there is nothing heroic and archaic: on the contrary, it is illuminated by a mysterious, almost metaphysical tension), what is happening under the frescoes of the vaults of the Villa di Capocotta exudes a rotten, sick, painful stench, the world of the names mentioned above was really present in Fellini, but was hidden behind a mask of seeming carelessness and cheerfulness of those years. Saverio Costanzo’s Americans are depicted as spoiled, capricious children, unable to contemplate emotions, devouring them with hasty greed, leaving no trace or roots to cultivate while patiently waiting for future growth. Mimosa, protected in her heart by the shield of her upbringing from her “matriarchal” family, meets her fall into hell with that unconscious determination that will allow her to pass the test and emerge from it better and more mature. How can one not read in all this a metaphor for the Italians’ difficult relationship with the cinema, a tool that fascism provided them with to entertain and tame with illusory promises of prosperity, but which, after the war, with the rigor of neorealism, to bring down on a torn and lost population the real dimensions of the tragedy that had just occurred? With the advent of the Americans and their spectacular cinema, which recreated Rome’s ancient and glorious past with papier-mâché in the studios of Cinecitta, Italy saw itself projected into the mirror of history and into the illusion of this magic lantern, more manipulated by rich, strange people. and beautiful foreigners, she rediscovered her lost determination to look ahead and face modernity with the strength of her own strong and healthy traditions.
“But are you really sure that Costanzo wanted to tell us all this?”
– No. But I like to think so. After all, a work is a gift that the artist gives us: we can then use it and play with it as we please. In my own way, I would just like to be able to point out to those who see the film a different analytical path in order to more clearly understand some deliberate slowness, some atmospheres that are not immediately read and understood.
And there are two of us in this.
– I quickly add a few words about the “Palace” of the author. Roman Polanski, who at the age of 90 and with the complicity of his compatriot Jerzy Skolimowski, with whom he wrote the script, gave us (see? Art is always a gift that we must make ourselves worthy of) another stratospheric lesson of the “grotesque”. His big hotel in the middle of the Alps, where an army of very rich and very powerful Earth tycoons (pretext for a bizarre parade of stars, from Mickey Rourke to John Cleese, Fanny Ardant to Cidna Rome and Luca Barbareschi) gather to toast on New Year’s Eve 2000 , becomes a theater of sumptuous cinepanettone that culminates (filmed by the director of Chinatown!) with the most irreverent scene of modern cinema (warning! very spoiler!): under the tables recently At the end of the garland, a small dog copulates “dog-like” with … a penguin! said, “Dear all of you, you thought you were tired of me. Instead, I’m the one to shove this up your ass. Signed: Roman Polanski.”
“But… are you really sure?”
– No. But I just told you: art is a gift. Etc.
– Right this time. …You were talking about four strikes. One is missing.
– Really. “Arggo Dr1ft”, an ethical manifesto of tragic and monumental proportions, written by Harmony Korin. Post-basic, post-primitive, post-primordial, post-biblical, I would even say a post-evangelical post-western filmed with an infrared camera that caused some reckless viewers to call video games and run, which are very real images, but transformed by technical contrivances used in the filming stages into a hallucinatory journey dazzling figurative power. Korin has always been a guarantee, but with each new one he confirms our affection and of all those who follow him, he has always grown exponentially.
– A full barrel, I would say.
– And yet, here I am drunk with happiness.