Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2014

[Chris Knipp]

SYDNEY SIBILIA: I CAN QUIT WHENEVER I WANT/SMETTO QUANDO VOGLIO (2014)



Heated-up comedy about overeducated drug dealers

A topical Italian theme is of young men whose university education can't lead to commensurate professional opportunities and find their efforts trumped by others manipulating bribes and favors. Here, debut director Sydney Sibilia, who is mad about American movies and TV series, emulates them to a fault with a loud and unruly comedy of amateur criminals that only makes one nostalgic for Italian classics like Big Deal on Madonna Street. What has been added are high-decibal music, drugs, and vulgar language. This time there is a scientist, a mathematician, an anthropologist, Latin scholars, and so on whose poor employment leads them to accept the scheme of one of their number who designs an Ecstasy-like drug with a different chemical formula that is not on the Italian government's list of illegal substances. What they leave out of their calculations is a drug kingpin whose territory they are impinging on. The loud, precipitous action, vivid color, and noisy music and Roman settings are infections, if not overwhelming. The cast and crew may be having more fun than we are. Breaks in shooting reportedly had to be taken to stop laughing at the antics of the handsome comic leading man Edoardo Leo, who plays Pietro, the neurobiologist (see photo) who creates the new drug and hatches the plan to make big money skirting the law, gathering together a half dozen of his underemployed university colleagues. Given that I Can Quit is full of influences from "Breaking Bad" and other shows, the movie's big Italian success is a sign of Italy's deep infatuation with things American, but also a need to laugh at the country's social and economic injustices. An Italian review of the movie is called "'Big Deal on Madonna Street' at a time of 'Breaking Bad.'" The difference is that at the time of Germi's Big Deal (1958), Italian filmmakers were in the vanguard both in comedy and serious films; now they feel the need to see their own experience through the filter of American TV. Scenes show Pietro dealing with a thuggish university superior who is strictly interested in making lucrative deals. He has Latinist colleagues who work for a Pakistani boss at a gas station. Another in a typically funny, over-the-top scene tries in vain to pretend he never finished high school to get an illegal job. Even the rival drug kingpin turns out to have a specialized university degree. In his family life Pietro is retro: he must hide the facts from his shrewish, suspicious wife Giulia (Valeria Solarino). Needless to say, the social issues referred to here have been seriously addressed in quite a few recent Italian films. Facing the inroads of downsizing or other financial disasters was taken up in Silvio Soldini's memorable Days and Clouds, (Open Roads 2008) and this theme got a more downbeat treatment in Ivan De Matteo's Balancing Act (New Italian Cinema, SFFS 2012). Giovanni Avellini's Some Say No (New Italian Cinema SFFS 2011) showed young people revolting against the pervasive injustice of Italian corruption and favoritism.

I Can Quit Whenever I Want/Smetto quando voglio, 100 mins., debuted in Italy 6 Feb. 2014. Screened at its US premiere in Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center Fri. 6 June 2014. It showed also Sun. 8 June.

[Chris Knipp]

GIOVANNI VERONESI: THE FIFTH WHEEL/L'ULTIMA RUOTA DEL CARRO (2013)


ELIO GERMANNO AND ALESSANDRA MASTROARDI IN THE FIFTH WHEEL

Saga of an ordinary man

In this sometimes winning and always tumultuous Italian drama, appealing for its lead performance by Elio Germanno of Luchetti's My Brother Is an Only Child, here playing Ernesto, a Roman everyman is followed from childhood up to middle age. Germanno, who at thirty-four already has 49 film credits, also played a family striver in Luchetti's 2010 Our Life. (SF New Italian Cinema 2011). Ernesto is called a loser by his father early on, and his various efforts to find interesting work fail. Ernesto winds up working for his dad, later running his own moving company, really shouldering symbolic heavy burdens up and down stairs despite having a bad back. A friendship with an eccentric "pop" artist (Alessander Habe) who does giant Seventies-style collage-paintings gets Ernesto close to success and fame, though he only winds up delivering the artist's paintings to rich buyers. Again and again the movie underlines the inequalities of Italian and particularly Roman life, while affirming Ernesto's soulfulness. To underline his everyman-ishness, Ernesto and his family, both generations, are depicted as passionate football fans, reciting the names of the favorite team's main players being a requirement at each birthday celebration. Things get most satisfyingly corny at the end when Ernesto frantically searches in the Rome city dump for a lost winning lottery ticket, then tells his wife he's already won the lottery -- just having his life.

Besides its sentimental celebration of being Roman, honest, and average, The Fifth Wheel is is a quick runthrough of recent Italian history. So Ernesto and his coworkers get held in a building just as the Aldo Moro assassination has occurred, Bettino Craxi is showered in pennies by an angry crowd, and eventually a row of Berlusconi campaign posters appears, and one of Ernesto's more dubious, but useful, associates sings the praises of the rich politician at the dinner table. Meanwhile a succession of scenes show Ernesto's coworkers becoming more and more crooked, particularly his moving company partner Giacinto (Ricky Memphis), who gets involved in a socialist party scam of switching receipts. Lots of the improprieties of the Seventies and Eighties are superficially alluded to in in this good-natured but never profound film, whose protagonist remains a Forest Gump-like blank, surrounded by the kind of boisterous, noisy Italian family we've seen in many pictures before. Italians must like this kind of movie, since they make so many of them, but this is not one of the memorable or original ones. Even the sympathetic Elio Germanno can be considered rather wasted.

The Fifth Wheel/L'ultima ruota del carro, 113 mins., debuted at Rome out of competition Nov. 2013 as the opening night film and opened theatrically in Italy a week later. It was screened for this review 6 June 2014 as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center, its US premiere, where it also played 11 June.

[Chris Knipp]

ALBERTO FASULO: TIR (2013)



The voluntary servitude of relatively good money in a pan-European market

The hardworking, sincere Italian filmmaker Albert Fasulo's debut feature, which some have called "neo-neorealism," is a docudrama using actors in authentic found settings to present socio-economic reportage in dramatic form. In Tir the settings are not glamorous, though they provide the glamor, or shock, of the authentic. The protagonist, Bronko (Bronko Zavrsan of No Man's Land), drives a "tir" or big rig tractor trailer all over western Europe. His Italian employers constantly push him and his coworkers to give up sleep time and add to driving time to make deadlines and satisfy clients. Bronko, like his co-driver Maki (Marijan Sestak), with whom he is working at first, is a composite based on Fasulo's three-plus years of research accompanying many different drivers on their trips. Fasulo chose a Croatian rather than Italian lead because today the majority of these drivers are Eastern European. Bronko is a former schoolteacher who drives big rigs for an Italian shipping company all ll around western Europe. He accepts being cut off from his family for lengthy periods because this way he can earn around $2,00 a month, three or four times what a teacher gets at home, besides which, his teaching job was not secure.

The director also operated the camera, living in the truck with Zavrsan for most of the four months during which he shot the film. Zavrsan likewise is living the experience he is performing. In today's Italian cinematic scene of glossy, feel-good films, Fasulo's authenticity created such an impression that Tir won the top prize at its debut in the Rome Film Festival in November 2013. There is something tonic and fresh, in an Italian context, anyway, about a movie that doesn't go for glitz or entertainment. But it's only fair to add, as Jay Weissberg of Variety wrote from Rome, that while Tir is "solid" and "intermittently engrossing," it's "rarely vital," and it does "perhaps too good a job of showing the boredom of the long haul."

Tir is even more monotonous, or at least harsher, than the much admired little Latin American truck-travel docudrama Las Acacias (ND/NF 2012), Pablo Giorgelli's closely observational film set in a vehicle loaded with lumber that's driven all across Argentina. From start to finish of Giogelli's film the driver has a hitchhiker, a young woman with a cute little baby in tow. Contact between the two adults is shy and reserved, but there's a kind of sweet romantic pull. Fasulo is dealing with a more widespread and specific phenomenon. Bronko is driving a big rig that's like many others, one equipped with modern electronic maps and a device for drivers to clock in and out, among other things, an essential transport vehicle that's part of a network of networks in which the driver is only a pawn in the game, though an essential one. Most of the time Bronko is alone, if connected to home by cell phone, so far less cut off than a nineteenth-century indentured sailor spending two years before the mast, but still in a sense trapped in limbo. When Bronko and Maki are together then share meals by the side of the truck and talk. Maki wants to quit as soon as he can. Broko gets calls from his wife Isa (Lucka Pockaj that are annoying, even maddening at times. She leads him to believe the mechanic that fixed her car's lights went out drinking and dancing with her and a friend and they were tempted to do more. Another time Isa calls saying a temporary teaching job has come up for him, but he must annoy her by rejecting it, because the money and security won't be sufficient, though he is choosing a longly life thousands of kilometers from home over being with his family working at a quiet, civilized job in his own native land. Later Bronko agrees grudgingly to let his grown son have a large block of his savings for the down payment on an apartment in town. His wife calls soon after, furious after learning about this and insisting the savings are her and Bronko's retirement account. Bronko is helpless as these conversations wash over him, so numbed by the long tiring drives at times he barely knows what day it is.

Sometimes the load and even the truck can be switched by the company at the last minute, most tellingly, near the film's end, going from earlier potatoes and apples to a truck full of live pigs, a burden Bronko does not know how to deal with. The driver of the pig truck has just gotten fed up and bailed from his job. Bronko has to fill in and save the pigs. Patience is required to watch all this. Fasulo cunningly edits to convey the sense of a good long stretch of real time. But imagine the patience required of these drivers. Fasulo's film may be slight, if original seen in an Italian context; but as a contribution to a cinema of social and economic issues, it has a place.

Tir, 90 mins., debuted at Rome, with the prize mentioned; also played at Belfort and Vilnius. Screened for this review as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center 7 June 2014. At the Lincoln Center Q&A Fasulo reported that Zarvan not only got his trucker's license for this role but was officially hired for by the trucking firm, which commended him on the thoroughness of his preparation. This makes the performance and the shoot scrupulously true-to-life, as well as informed by Fasulo's years of research. In this case as Weissberg suggests, the Rome prize is as much for the ideas and information the film conveys and its authenticity as for the film itself.

[Chris Knipp]

EDOARDO WINSPEARE: QUIET BLISS/IN GRAZIA DI DIO (2013)


BARBARA DE MATTEIS, LAURA LICCHETTA AND CELESTE CASCIARIO IN QUIET BLISS

Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown

In Edoardo Winspeare's turbulent, shifty Quiet Bliss (In grazia di Dio) a family cedes to debt and Chinese competition in making high fashion wear for Milanese couturiers and must close their small clothing factory, sell it and their house, and move to their property overlooking the sea, which includes an olive grove. Back to the Land. But Quiet Bliss? Hardly. The English-language title is ironic if not simply off-the-wall. Four women of three generations are thrown on their own devices, and at each other's throats, while men hover on the periphery, only causing trouble. Before the move, two men, dad Croccifisso, (Antonio Carluccio) and brother Vito (Amerigo Russo) get caught while marooned in a stolen boat in some stupid but unspecified illegal venture and go to jail. Vito gets out and takes his family away to the north. This movie is like an opera in which instead of singing arias, the ladies and an occasional man periodically haul off and scream invective at each other, in dialect. The effect is wearing, if intermittently involving. As time goes on and the various plotlines sputter, it turns into a neorealist soap. The patois is thick and the setting is the stark but lovely Finis Terrae, Leuca, where the Adriatic meets the Ionian sea within sight of the Greek coast. This is in the region of Lecce, Puglia, in the tip of the heel of the "boot" of Italy where the Austrian-born director grew up, and with which he seems obsessed.

The film is notable not only for sunlit locations but Winspeare's use of non-pros throughout. In charge of the family is Adele, played by Celeste Casciario, the director's wife, a ravaged Sofia Loren type. It's Adele who decides the factory must close and the property must be quickly sold (at a considerable loss). Adele then persuades her frivolous sexpot daughter Ina (played by Laura Licchetta, Winspeare's stepdaughter), still in school and making out with various young men in cars, and her plump sister Maria Concetta (Barbara De Matteis), who wants to become an actress, to join her still-attractive mother Salvatrice (Anna Boccadamo) on the little farm. Adele begins selling their fruit, vegetables, and eggs to businesses in town to pay off outstanding debts. The patient, pious Salvatrice takes up with a 65-year-old local farmer, Cosimmo (Angelino Ferrarese), and a late-blooming romance is born that repels the obstreperous, foul-mouthed Ida. The nicest person in the story (and the most believable non-actor) is Adele's former classmate Stefano (Gustavo Caputo), a shy government bureaucrat who lives with his 90-year-old mother. Stefano spots Adele, whom he evidently had a crush on, in an office of Equitalia where he works protesting her debts, and he becomes a good samaritan, or tries to, beginning with adjusting down the debt. His efforts to tutor the lazy, stubborn Ina aren't much of a success at first, and Adele is hard hearted toward most men, including him. She and Maria Concetta hurl plenty of abuse at each other, and Maria Concetta misses a big audition for Ozpotek due to her sister's hard-heartedness, indifference, and obsession with debts. An inexplicable interlude when Adele treats herself one night to a costly dress and solitary fancy dinner suggests her responsible ways may indeed mask the selfishness the other women accuse her of.

The film loses focus in its latter half and suffers from an unappealing and somewhat opaque protagonist and a failure to develop other characters except peripherally. Prison visits, Salvatrice's wedding to Cosimo, and a subplot involving Ina's unintended pregnancy don't make up for this. A feel-good final tableau of reconciliation among the women seems hastily tacked on and leaves everything still dangling after over two hours of rambling episodes. The production is interesting for its unusual setting and "homemade" nature, including not only non-actors (though more refrained and subtle pros might have been better) but eco-sensitive use of local products and avoidance of gas emissions, more than for the erratic, overlong film. Writing by Alessandro Valenti, Anna Boccadamo, and Edoardo Winspeare and editing by Andrea Facchini could have used greater selectivity and focus. There seem to have been no English-language Berlinale reviews. One negative one in Italian on "filmtv" by Maurri 63, is brutal but makes good points. The film's Salentino dialect was subtitled for Italian viewers.

Quiet Bliss/In grazia di Dio, 127 mins., debuted in the Panorama section of the Berlinale 6 February 2014 and was released in Italy 27 March. Screened for this review as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center 9 June 2014.

[Chris Knipp]

EMMA DANTE: A STREET IN PALERMO (2013)


ALBA ROHRWACHER AND EMMA DANTE IN A STREET IN PALERMO

Stubborn hotheads

In this original but claustrophobic and overlong movie a lesbian couple squabble in their car in front of a jittery camera. Rosa, played by Emma Dante, a theatrical director whose novel this is based upon, and and her lover, Clara (Alba Rohrwacher, I Am Love, The Man Who Will Come), have made the trip from Milan to Sicily's capital and are on their way to a friend’s wedding. It's hot, they're tired, and their relationship seems on the verge of ending. Apart from travel fatigue, Rosa, who hails from Palermo but rarely comes back now, is put in a bad mood just by the memories her home town brings back. As they drive into a narrow street (we're told it's Via Castellana Bandiera, the film's Italian title, but to the untutored eye it just looks like any dusty alley), they come head-on to a tiny old vehicle full of locals coming in the opposite direction from a day by the water, which we have also gotten glimpses of. The occupants turn out to be members of the Calafiore family. Driving is Samira (Elena Cotta, who won the Venice Best Actress award for her stolid performance), an aged crone of Albanian origin. In the car is her large, boorish son-in-law, Saro Calafiore (Renato Malfatti), a former handyman who now claims disability, and a bossy, foul-mouthed, dialect-spewing troublemaker. He insists they not back up, and commands Samira to remain in place. Rosa, angry at the world, apparently, and happy for a fight, is unwilling to back up too. The standoff lasts all evening, all night, and into the early morning, though people get in and out of the cars.

This is meant to be a portrait of Sicilian and perhaps Italian stubbornness, and hardly a flattering one. Many details of local culture are presented during the course of the lengthy standoff, which includes action in the Calafiore house nearby, where the son-in-law takes bets on what will happen. Young Nicolò (Dario Casarolo), who has been diving -- the family is coming from a day by the sea, is a peacemaker, who is concerned for Samira, whose physical strength is taken to its limits by this standoff, and also spends an hour or so walking around with Clara.

There are amusements and Dante pumps a lot of dramatic content and a surprising variety of characters and scenes into this basically simple and static situation, but the action nonetheless is overshadowed by its inevitable air of utter pointlessness. While this may or may not be entertaining for viewers, it is a kind of metaphor for Italy, which may see itself as stuck in hopeless conflicts and unable to movie forward. One may question whether the action can support such larger significance, however. Other than the side betting on the outcome, which winds up being only a small element, there seems to be not so much at stake in the action. Perhaps Saro has the betting scheme in mind all along. But Rosa's willingness to dig in seems somewhat inexplicable. One would think she of all people would want to get on with it. At the end there is a quietly tragic finale, a relaxation of the tension, and the seeming reconciliation of Rosa and Clara, but all that feels like a bit of a letdown after the ordeal we've gone through. There are a lot of scenes that feel drawn out too long, like the extended stable shot that ends the film, with people running up to and beyond the camera, which is attractive at first, but then continues till it loses all verisimilitude. More patient viewers may feel otherwise.

Alba Rohrwacher is the sister of Alice Rohrwacher, director of Corpo Celeste, who just won the Grand Prize at Cannes for her new film The Wonders/Le meraviglie.

A Street in Palermo/Via Castellana Bandiera, 93 mins., debuted at Venice.

[Chris Knipp]

PIERFRANCESCO DILIBERTO: THE MAFIA ONLY KILLS IN SUMMER/LA MAFIA UCCIDE SOLO D'ESTATE (2013)


ALEX MISCONTI AS ARTURO COSTUMED AS ANDREOTTI IN THE MAFIO ONLY KILS IN SUMMER

Growing up journalistic

This is a very charming semi-autobiographical comedy that at the same time is a meaningful study of southern Italian politics, in particular the destructive, homicidal role played by the Mafia. Unfortunately Diliberto's story as he tells it lacks thrust and unity as a movie, falling too much into two unrelated parts, and as it progresses it degenerates into the style of TV sit-com. This is not surprising given the director's primary experience as a television comedian and political commentator known by the nickname "Pif." But despite this disappointment thre is much to enjoy here.

Diliberto does something unique, though it may not altogether translate for non-Italian audiences, by building rom-com charm on top of a grizzly chronicle of organized crime assassinations, blending charm and horror. The first half concerns the adolescent protagonist, who worships longtime politician (with rumored Mafia connections) Giulio Andreotti (of Il Divo, alluded to here) and even goes to a school costume party made up as him, collecting clippings of Mafia killings of political and government figures in town. Even his birth has coincided with the election of the Mafioso mayor Vito Ciancimino and a massacre ordered by the crime boss Salvatore Riina. Some of these later eliminated figures Arturo gets to know personally, because he is an accomplished amateur journalist. He is also hopelessly in love with pretty blond in his class Flora (Ginevra Antona), who mostly seems to prefer another boy. It doesn't hurt that at this age the narrator, Arturo, is played by the adorable Alex Bisconti.

The way Arturo's interest in politics, the law, and Mafia killings and his precocious journalistic ambitions lead him to meet up with real-life Eighties anti-Mafia figures, including General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (all, along with half a dozen others chronicled here, later offed by the Mob) makes Arturo into a sort of localized, Sicilian version of Forest Gump, brushing with history, Mafia-style.

The time when the movie becomes lopsided comes when it suddenly jumps to Arturo as an adult, played by Diliberto himself (not looking as young as he's supposed to be, or resembling the younger actor) Alex Bisconti). And at this point there is a certain disappointment also because the boy's promise and ambition don't see to have led him very far. h His journalistic ambitions have narrowed to television, and he joins a silly, broadly caricatured Italian TV show called "Bonjour," at first only as its comically incompetent pianist. Flora reappears after being out of Arturo's life for years, as the attractive actress Cristiana Capotondi. She seems as indifferent as ever, but willing to help Arturo into more serious work, as she's the aide of a politician and brings him on the staff. Arturo remains a virgin; his innocence may be meant to mimic the feigned ignorance of Sicilians and Palermitani, who pretend not to know their world is surrounded by corruption. The Mafia, obviously, dos not only kill in summer. But Arturo only becomes aware of the crime all around him with major news coverage of a mass trial of a Mafia clan.

The appeal of this movie despite its lopsidedness is in how its amusing and lighthearted surface only slightly hides the darker truths underneath. At the end, there is a homage to all the judges and politicians assassinated by the Mafia in Palermo in the period covered, with a collage of the newspaper clippings to show every viewer that these were real events. Further we're informed that Pif AKA Diliberto avoided paying the usual bribes for location shooting, joining up with the "Addiopizzo" movement of businesses refusing to pay Mafia protection fees. So like Sydney Sibilia's I Can Quit Whenever I Want only more so, this conveys a serious message via an entertaining genre.

The Mafia Only Kills in Summer/La Mafia uccide solo d'estate,