Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center 2021

[Chris Knipp]

GIANLUCA, MASSIMILIANO DE SERIO : UNA PROMESSA (2020)


SALVATORE ESPOSITO, SAMUELE CARRINO IN UNA PROMESSA

Neoealism gone astray

This new film by the De Serio brothers is a strange hybrid, whose unrelated elements seriously undermine its social-political theme - a neorealist film of worker's struggle at the bottom of the economic scale that turns into a revenge horror movie with fantasy twists. It's indigestible and as time goes on nearly unwatchable.

Documentary filmmakers with serious social concerns, they have produced here ostensibly an indictment of the despicable institution of the caporalato. This is a system of agricultural slavery that particularly exploits extracomunitari, refugee-immigrants from outside the European Union (Africa, the Middle East).(The film reportedly uses real excomunitari as extras and is highly realistic in depicting what their life is like. But the De Serio turn the action in non-realistic directions from the first, adding elements of melodrama, pathos, surrealism, and magic realism. The result is puzzling and disturbing, ultimately hard to take seriously, and even hard to watch.

The directors show their quirky style from frame one with the child's POV "upside down kiss" exchanged by his mother and father before his mother goes off to work. The POV is that of Antò (Samuele Carrino), the couple's angelic-faced little boy. We learn later Antò's mother, Angela (Antonella Carone) works at the brutal, illegal caporalato his father Giuseppe (Salvatore Esposito) in desperation goes to work in when, soon into the action, Angela drops dead at work in the hot agricultural fields, apparently of a heart attack from stress and exhaustion. (The screenplay is partly based on a news story of the 2015 death of Paola Clemente, a farm worker in the Apulian countryside.)

Antò's perspective remains essential to the film. He lives partly in a fairytale world. Even when things become horrible, a certain strain of humor and sweetness remains in the constant warm and loving relation of father and son. The "promise" is another fairytale element: Giuseppe promises Antò that his mother is not dead forever, but will come back one day, and the boy holds onto this belief.

Since father and son stay close together in the ordeal of a desperate search to survive in challenging, realistically depicted circumstances, Una Promessa ("A Promise"), aka Spaccatore ("Stonebreaker") has been described as a modern day Bicycle Thief. That's a complete misunderstanding. This isn't anything like Rossellini's neorealist classic. It isn't realistic at all. Both little Samuele Carrino and big, chubby Salvatore Esposito (the latter famous for playing Genny Savastano, the ugly villain in Garrone's 2008 Gomorrah), are actors using their own actor-y voices, nothing like the illiterate from-the-streets non-actors whose voices were dubbed for Ladri di bicilette. Here Esposito maintains a lovable, cuddly, silent endurance, that only at the end explodes into rage and revenge - a transformation that has been compared to Marcello Fonte in Dogman as "a blind rage directly proportional to the abuse he has suffered."

Giuseppe has been unable to work at his brutal job as a stonebreaker at a quarry since a flying rock blinded him in one eye at work. Antò puts drops in his dad's eye every day which he thinks a magic fluid; he thinks the accident has given him superpowers. After Angela's sudden death Giuseppe must become the breadwinner. He now winds up in the net of his wife's tormentors when goes to work at the caporalato, and takes Antò with him. Yes, that's how he takes care of his little boy, by having him work at his side in the fields. They can't live in their cheap apartment anymore, so they come to live in one of the farms' filthy plastic tent shacks.
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The farm turns out to be owned by a sadistic pervert (Vito Signorile) who has a collection of antique pots (Antò's dream is to become an archeologist), is a man of "taste" who enjoys the hunt for wild boar, and who uses sex as an instrument of domination and self-amusement. Workers who die in the field, a regular occurrence, are put into plastic sacks and thrown into a ditch and forgotten. The master's will is carried out by Mimmo (Giuseppe Lo Console), a tall, shaven-headed, brutal enforcer, as in traditional depictions of slaver plantations in America. Now an important new character appears, Rosa (Licia Lanera), worker on the farm, who turns out to have been a friend of Angela's and to have been at her side when she died. A dark scene is witnessed where the master forced Rosa to slit the body of a hanging slain boar and then torments her with a hose. Later, Giuseppe, driving a tractor, intervenes to save Rosa from further torments, and from then on he is doomed.

We move from the Dardenne-style stalking of the first part (the Dardennes hinted at by the second film title of "A Promise") to the hyper-realism of pulp scenes in the master's house, to the surrealism of a headlong race at the end where Antò runs away after the murderous scene of revenge he and his father have participated in together, when he is joined by his dead other.

This combination here, the sudden morphing from gentle, touching miserablism to sudden operatic slasher revenge, is simply outrageous. Nonetheless the De Serio brothers know their documentary métier well and film the brutal exploitation of the farm laborers and the sun-drenched Apulian countryside beautifully, and all the action, including night scenes on the farm in Caravaggioesque chiaroscuro, has a compulsive, jaw-dropping watchability. It's just not artistically or sociologically convincing.

Action is effectively highlighted, the luridness chilled a bit, by the distorted guitars of Gatto Ciliegia against Il Grande Freddo.

Una Promessa , 104 mins, debuted at Venice 2020 as the only Italian film in the Days section, also Kustendorf. Released in Italy and in France. AlloCiné press rating 2.5 (50%). It was screened at home online for this review as part of the FLC Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series (May 28-Jun. 6, 2021).

[Chris Knipp]

SALVATORE MEREU: ASSANDIRA (2020)


ANNA KÖNIG, GAVINO LEDDA IN ASSANDIRA

A bonfire of the agri-vanities becomes a police procedural

It is a premise of this film and the novel by Giulio Angioni on which it is based, set on a farm in Sardinia, that agriturism destroys and cheapens country life and traditions, not, as many think, revitalizing rural communities and saving their patrimony. What could be more illustrative of this perceived negative effect than the warping of a small family's inner structure and finally the destruction of a whole Sardinian sheep farming site - and agriturism hq - by fire causing the death of an only son and the loss of a newborn baby? There's no time to balk at this theme or this action since the fire a fait accompli when the movie begins. We are immediately enveloped in an atmosphere of doom, tragedy, and suspicion and it was only after the film's 126 minutes were over that I had time to think.

In its way this is an impressive film. The protagonist, the elderly, rugged shepherd Constantino, is played by Gavino Ledda, a Sardinian cultural icon whose mere presence lends gravitas to the proceedings. He is a Sardinian, son of a shepherd like his character, and his life was as austere and remarkable as anything pointed to here. Indeed we know about it from his famous autobiography, Padre Padrone ("My Father My Master), source of the also famous Taviani brothers 1977 film whose screenplay Ledda collaborated on. Slim and gnarly with a full head of dark wavy hair at 80, he is an intense, world-weary, disapproving presence in nearly every scene both as narrator/commentator and participant in the flashbacks that fill most of the film's run-time.

In his enthusiastic Variety review, Jay Weissberg calls this film Salvatore Mereu's "riskiest yet." It is risky and laden with significance, unfolding, as Weissberg says, in successive layers. This is a film out to make an intense impression. But it is marred by both lacunae and repetitiousness. Even its construction undermines its effort to be meaningful. There are signs that the book had just too much to develop even in a two-hour film. The division into chapters - "the pool," "the son," "the photograph," "the fire inside," etc. - can't make up for limited space.

Setting the story in a mystery-police procedural framework helps contain the material and lend suspense, though the mystery feels unresolved and the outcome is obviously flat. Action starts with Constantino in a heavy rain. It's drenching the ruined farm buildings that were destroyed the day before. A big white mare that has played a symbolic role earlier wanders onsite and symbolically dies. All we know is that everything was destroyed. Constantino's son Mario (Marco Zucca) has died. Mario's pregnant German wife Greta (Anna König) is in the hospital, her condition and the baby's unknown. We will see a lot of them, especially of Greta.

Constantino's voiceover dominates, delivered in a low voice, almost whispered sometimes in commentary on scenes and on dialogue while they're going on, as flashbacks reveal events that led up to this tragedy. It began when Mario and Greta come for their annual summer visit but turn it into long stay in which they arrange to rehab a farm building and turn it into an agriturism spot - despite Constantino's strenuous resistance.

As events unfold al lot of objecting and arguing goes on and then suddenly without much transition the agriturismo is a done deal, called Assandira, a local word that's never explained, just as it's never explained why Greta takes so many polaroids when they first arrive and then gives out polaroid cameras to the tourist guests and encourages generous use of them.

Greta is big and busty, babbling in her own makeshift Italian (not Sardinian; she doens't know that, as Constantino doensn't know the English that will be the lingua franca of the tourists). Weissberg is telling when he says König as Greta "remains vibrantly real rather than a caricature of the German in Italy." Caricature is left to the gaggles of tourist-guests, though Greta isn't subtle. She is grinning and loud and has boobs out or nearly-out much of the time, but she is so much in control of her scenes that we accept her. She leaves little room for Mario, a wiry, bearded, argumentative man who yet lacks authority. He emigrated to Berlin and became a waiter. Now he is back at home, posing as a shepherd's son. They put on costumes. It becomes fake. We get it. This is a cloying, hyper-touristic place now. Constantino still has to put the livestock out to pasture. Events like milking, or mating two horses, become shows for the paying guests. These guests don't seem to share in the work, even merely for show.

But details are lacking, like how this all got set up, and who the other employees are. There are several photogenic young local men now on the scene, some making trouble for both Mario and Constantino, but one suspects the novel explains better who they are.

After scenes around the building of a swimming pool, regarded by Constantino as a wholly inappropriate object in a place where bathing is normally so austere, leads to concern about Greta getting pregnant. This is where dynamics of the trio, Constantino-Greta-Mario, get complicated. And then there is the strange, licentious fête conducted in a barn, a Visconti moment, which the old man accidentally walks in on. With this scene, agriturismo morphs inexplicably from crude and crass to pornographic. And then, I suppose, we are ready for a great bonfire. And then the investigation to determine the nature of it and the cause can become the main focus at last. Perhaps one is a little exhausted by then. Gavino Ledda sees very, very tired, but he remains a charismatic sufferer and in his own way a distinguished and memorable figure. At the end, though the nimble camera of young dp Sandro Chessa has carried us through many a mobile action, what remains in the mind is a white mare stumbling to her death and the sad, tired face of Gavino Ledda.

Assandira, 126 mins., debuted at Venice Sept 62020, opening theatrically in Italy Sept. 9; showed at Haifa, Greek Film Archive, Venice-to-Moscow, Luxembourg City, and Rheims Polar. It was screened at home online for this review as part of the FLC Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series (May 28-Jun. 6, 2021).

[Chris Knipp]

PIETRO MARCELLO: FOR LUCIO/PER LUCIO (2021)


LUCIO DALLA IN FOR LUCIO

Hairy-beautiful: portrait of late Italian 'cantautore' Lucio Dalla

Following Lost and Beautiful (2015) and Martin Eden (2019), Pietro Marcello returns to documentary with a warm little reminiscence by his longtime manager, Umberto (Tobia) Righi, and a lifelong friend, Stefano Bonaga, of late Bolognese cantautore (singer-songwriter) Lucio Dalla, who died in 2012 at 68. The film will introduce anglophone viewers to a cultural figure they won't know, but it is of most interest to Italians and it's also limited by only providing information that comes in on-camera interviews with Righi and a long lunch between Righi and Bonaga. There are few other voices heard, despite a TV clip of a round table featuring politicians and journalists deferring to Dalla, showing his status by then as a national figure.

Dalla's song 1986 "Caruso" has been covered by numerous international artists and led to his singing a duo version with Luciano Pavarotti. His fame seems to have grown through the nineties

Dalla is hard to pigeonhole, but seems halfway between Bob Dylan and a French auteur-compositeur-interprète like Jacques Brel or Serge Gainsbourg, but maybe less central to the culture, though still loved. Marcello has a penchant for interjecting historical footage, processed to a uniform look, into his films, and here such footage, evoking the look of people and cities of the period of his rise and flowering, alternates with interviews and performance films of Lucio Dalla himself.

Dalls began as a cherubic child "genius" star performer. He mastered several musical instruments, including the clarinet and piano, and he had a penchant for jazz. As he grew up, turning to song writing with less complex but musically-informed melodies, he was a quietly striking figure, a stocky little guy with a short beard, often in beret, often with open shirt displaying a hirsute torso. His hairiness led to the nickname [I]ragno[, spider./I] He was not handsome, maybe even "ugly," but he had a distinctive look. He represents the same group of singers valued for their content and not their prettiness - like Dylan, like Serge Gainsbourg. He is known for his collaboration in the early seventies with Bolognese poet-intellectual Roberto Roversi, whom the two interviewees describe as an enigmatic loner. For a period of years Dalla issued three albums on which he sang songs written to poems by Roversi. It was a prestigious collaboration, even if some of the work was not popular. Some of the songs also were. Dalla had issued his first recording in 1964.

A high point, probably the high point, of the film focuses on Dalla's song "Mille Miglia." This celebrates a high point of the event that dominated the Italian car racing scene and captured the international imagination from 1927 to 1957. We see Dalla singing the song, while Marcello uses historic footage to bring to life this colorful event that shows Italy at its most handsome, sexy, and elegant and illustrates what pop stars racing drivers were over several decades. The vibrancy of moments like this makes up for the fact that a lot of Marcello's film is just talking heads. We get a glimpse of the way Dalla's songs were rich in commentary on Italian politics and society and expressive of the decades of his greatest popularity. A more ambitious film, or perusal of books and articles, would be required to grasp the full value of the man and his time. But if it was not rigorous this was pleasant and (for the rich use of clips) artistic, and a nice relaxing way to end FLC's Open Roads Italian series, which has contained some somewhat demanding watches.

"Mille Miglia" comes from Dalla's 1976 album Automobili ("Automobiles"). The opening track is a long dig at FIAT owner Gianni Agnelli delivering bland answers when accused of selling a part of the company to Libya and thereby losing Italian jobs. A clear sign of how of his time and engagé Dalla was.

But not totally an agent for change: the Wikipedia articlementions that he was outed as gay after his funeral and he kept a low profile all his life, though for many years living with a male partner, Marco Alemanno, who was with him when he died of a heart attack the morning after a concert in Montreux, Switzerland. Not mentioned in Marcello's film. The article says Dalla's funeral in his native Bologna was attended by approximately 50,000 people.

For Lucio/Per Lucio, 79 mins., debuted on the internet in Italy Mar. 1, 2021. Also shown at CPH DOX (Denmark) Apr. 21, 2021 and scheduled for the Berlinale for Jun. 18, 2021. It was screened at home online for this review as part of the FLC Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series (May 28-Jun. 6, 2021).