Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2024

[Chris Knipp]

STEFANO SOLLIMA: ADAGIO (2023)


PANORAMA OF A ROME EDGED BY FIRE IN ADAGIO

Cops and gangsters circle each other around a boy in an apocalyptic Rome

Rome is taking a beating again in Stefano Sollima's lugubrious Adagio. In last year's series the Eternal City was running out of water in Paolo Virzì's Dry/Siccità. - a vaguely sketched if pervasive eco-disaster. Here there is an apocalyptic edge. The city is ringed with fires. Large plumes of dark smoke loom on the edges that are closing in as the film comes to its slow end. Lights often go out because the fires cause power outages, then finally everyone is trying to flee.

In the foreground the city's famous landmarks are never glimpsed, but the color-saturated action feels momentous. Cops and gangsters circle around each other, a couple of the latter played by no less than Pierfrancesco Favino and Toni Servillo, seen as no longer active criminals but still feared and hated. At the center of all this much ado is a young man, perhaps just a boy, whom the cops call "il cuccio," the Puppy, and has gotten himself into a world of "merda."

The Puppy is the shaven-headed, headphones-wearing Manuel (a perpetually startled-looking Gianmarco Franchini). He's an innocent - oddly enough, since he's the son of a retired gangster known as Daytona (Toni Servillo). Daytona wanders around reciting senseless sums, pretending to be addled, which some buy and others don't; with the masterful Servillo we're ready to believe whatever he wishes, including this elaborate, somewhat pointless shtick. Before the action begins, the cops have caught young Manual selling coke and threatened him with jail time to make him agree to gather intelligence for them. This is where we meet him, gaining entrance to a large, kinky "party" resembling a gay disco - the film's big, but brief, opening set piece - in order to secretly photograph the participants. But Manuel immediately gets freaked out after being photographed himself doing coke and bolts. There are many images of banks of surveillance camera screens in the film and also lots of complex mid-range horizontal images underlining a feeling of complexity and lack of a center.

Manuel, the Puppy, is the center of interest, but it's not altogether clear why he's so important except that everybody thinks he knows too much, and he has nowhere to hide. What he knows that is so crucial remains unclear, but he's frightened and exposed: he's also later reported to have been seen giving a blowjob, which in this macho world he of course would never want his father to hear about. (He pleads that it was only to make money.)

Much fuss seems to be getting made made over rather little here, despite style and mood, menace and violence, and the impressive star actors, who include Valerio Mastandrea as a now blind gangster called Polniuman (Paul Newman) whom Manuel goes to, who sends him to Camello (a well disguised Pierfrancesco Favino), a man gravely ill and just out of prison. Several characters are killed but they seem curiously unimportant to the action.

Director Sollima, who has worked on the "Gomorrah" series and other gangster dramas, regards this film as the last in a Roman trilogy. He has chosen as his movie title the musical designation for a slow and easy movement aptly, as a warning. The pic chugs along with occasional waves of energy. But the multiple plots go their own separate ways, and it all winds up taking half an hour longer than necessary.

Sollina has been accused of trying unnecessarily to play the "auteur" in Adagio when straightforward genre work would have been enough. Yes, these are some of Italy's greatest film actors. They do their damnedest to make their onscreen moments tasty. But the action is hampered by a screenplay lacking in solid motivation. There is a lot about families, fathers and sons, real names and assumed monikers. But these themes are not always well stabilized by a solid plot line.

Stefano Sollima is a director known for his crime dramas, such as ACAB – All Cops Are Bastards (2012), Suburra (2015), and Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), as well as the television series "Romanzo criminale – La serie" (2006–2008), "Gomorrah" (2014–2021) and "ZeroZeroZero" (2020). Perhaps not quite sure whether it's a feature or a series, his film is largely a mood piece that draws together mafiosi and carabinieri who circle around each other lengthily without the story ever quite drawing to a satisfying conclusion.

Adagio, 127 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2, 2023, also showing at Mumbai Oct. 29, and opening in Italian theaters Dec. 14; it was included at Rotterdam Jan. 26, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center (May 30-June 6). Showtimes:
Sunday, June 2 at 9:00pm
Wednesday, June 5 at 6:00pm