Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2024

[Chris Knipp]

Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2024
May 30- June 6, 2024 GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD


PIERFRANCESCO FAVINO IN EDOARDO DE ANGELIS' COMMANDANTE

[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 in 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circle around each other, a couple of the latter played by no less than Pierfrancesco Favino and Toni Servillo, seen as no longer active but still feared and hated.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 shaven-heaeded, 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 schtick. 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 direcdtor 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 end.

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

[Chris Knipp]

NANNI MORETTI: A BRIGHTER TOMORROW/IL SOL DEL'AVVENIRE (2023)


NANNI MORETTI IN A BRIGHTER TOMORROW

Moretti's study of a self-indulgent movie director is itself self-indulgent

Nanni Moretti is a special kind of Italian auteur who is priviledged in his own country. He even has his own movie theater in Rome. His work has varied from personal diary (Caro Diario) to the emotionally ravaging tale of family loss The Soh's Room, which won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes (he dealt effectively with the loss of a mother in Mia Madre), to the oddball study of the election of a Pope, Habemus Papem, and the attack on Berlusconi, The Caiman. Many of Moretti's films, though, feature a thinly disguised version of hiimself. A Brighter Tomorrow/Il sol del'avvenire returns to that format. It has been deemed a return to form by some, but that's a stretch. The last one, Tre Piani/Three Floors, (20211) got his bottom score ever on Metacritic, 42. A Brighter Tomorrow has a 47, his next-worst-ever score.

There have been a few pretty positive assessments of the new film. But Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, usually a generous critic, while describingThe Son's Room as "the greatest Cannes Palme d’Or winner of the century so far," calls this new one "bafflingly awful." That's slightly harsh. Some will find its leftist reworking of Fellini's 8 1/2, with Moretti himself confidently, if sometimes gratingly, in the Mastroianni/Fellini role, to be intermittently watchable. But it can definitely be recommended only for Moretti completists outside his home turf, where it has been well received. Note that since the Palme d'Or, Moretti gets free inclusion in Competition at Cannes, and as a result this film has been reviewed in all the major journals, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, IndieWire, etc. That all those critics bothered to write reviews means something.

Giovanni (Moretti, going by his real first name) is a director working on a movie about Italian communists during the time of the Hungarian Revolution. At the same time he, nearing age 70 (as is Nanni) faces near chaos, which he faces with a rgidity that's self-mocking, but hardly cuddly. His producer (an oily, grinning Matthieu Almaric) bolts; his wife of 40 years, also his partner and produceer (Margharita Buy, familiarly in this role) is telling him she's splitting. And this is pretty obviously not a movie that would ever get made anyway. The way Giovanni makes arbitrary changes in his film at the last minute is more obnoxious than auteurist.

But as Lee Marshall of Screen Daily puts it in one of the most favorable reviews, Moretti here can be seen as "once again" having created "edgy comedy out of a process of self-therapy." Moretti, who is tall and still fairly good-looking and carries himself well, still presents a commanding figure on screen, while sometimes being funny, sometimes even appealing.

Giovanni, who forces his family to watch Jacques Demy classic Lola before each production (this time they walk out), has no time for actors who improvise or otherwise bring their own ideas to the set and In one scene he takes a pair of scissors to a freshly tailored costume saying this will makes it look more "realistic." Unfortunately there isn't much in this film and its film-within-films (there are two; another one being produced by young Koreans) that is realistic, though a meeting with Netflix is a grim breath of global commerce.

At the end, there is simply a parade of Moretti's friends and actors in former films, one more pointless self-indulgence in a film that has been a string of them. And one more thing that will delight his Italian fans.

A Brighter Tomorrow/Il sol dell’avvenire, 95 mins., debuted at Cannes 2023. Screened for this review as part of the annual Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center (May 30-Jun. 6, 2024). Showtimes at the Walter Reade Theater:
Saturday, June 1 at 8:00pm
Thursday, June 6 at 3:30pm

[Chris Knipp]

PIETRO CASTELLITTO: ENEA (2023)


CESARE CASTELLITTO, BENEDETTA PORCAROLI, AND PIETRO CASTELLITTO IN ENEA

World-weary young Romans deal coke in a grandiose film that sometimes impresses, sometimes bores

The young man with the epic name (Aeneas) is played by Pietro Castellitto, son of Sergio, who also wrote and directed. This is his second such effort; his first was the expletive-intense, award-winning The Predators three years ago). Enea doesn't do the dealing for money; his is a wealthy family with a therapist father and a talk show host mother, but to experience something that takes him away from the void of contemporaneity, from a Rome that seen from above looks to him, flying his little private plane, "like a concentration camp." He manages a high-end sushi restaurant but does the crooked stuff for thrills, with his friend Valentino (Giorgio Quarzo Guarascio). Younger brother Cesare Castellitto gets to play another family role as teenage brother Simone, aka Brenno.

But this film feels dead on arrival with a tedious opening conversation between Enea and mom ((Chiara Noschese)) and Valentino about how boring their lives are. Sincerity is not found in the family, at least not in that of Rome well staged by Castellitto , but in conversations with criminals while negotiating the payment for a big cocaine deal. The short-lived gangster Giordano (crime film vet Adamo Dionisi) has some of the best lines: he is allowed to be soulful and human. Castellitto seems sometimes better here at playing with glamor and danger and gangsters, tedious when he tries to deiect the boredom of his wealthy surroundings; his skill in that area comes and goes; there are good moments. There are too many generalizations, but there is some passion and wit when his character says his contemporaries all speak every Christmas of their "remorse" for "the buildings they didn't buy, the trips they didn't take, the love affairs they should have had." It's pretty powerful when Enea's father Celeste, played by PIetro's actual famous actor father, says then, "The difference between us is that I came from a poor family, and you didn't."

They differ on Rome itself. Again as in Simone Sollima's apocalyptic Adagio,, we never see landmarks. Enea thinks it looks like a cemetery from above. His mother thinks its dark skyline is gorgeous at night when they are all eating a long gourmet meal in their restaurant, a "journey" with accompanying "flight" of wine. The trappings of contemporary wealth are sometimes well captured - a long thin modern sofa, the tall speakers of a costly audio system.

The big cocaine deal carried out by Enea and Valentino, amateur crime that goes wrong is a familiar and perhaps promising theme, but here it feels patched-in, as is the tree that falls and crushes the house and the burglars who later invade the house and break things but don't steal anything; Celeste pointlessly trashing a room. A lot seems done for effect, out of cinematic braggadocio. David Rooney, writing in Hollywood Reporter at Venice, was devastating, calling this film a "genre-adjacent non-thriller" that you won't like unless you have a taste for "well-heeled Romans blathering on" about "the encroaching emptiness inside them." Rooney calls the film "overlong" and "windy," it's investigation of the "hypocrisy, shallowness and moral decay of wealthy Italians" feeling "too embedded in that world to have much bite."

Guy Lodge in his Variety review calls Enea"emptily swaggering," less sharp than the young director's debut three years ago, which won the Venice Horions Screenplay prize. This one, Lodge notes, feels overlong with the way it hammers away its points, and its overblown style is "plainly indebted to Paolo Sorrentino at his most ostentatious." However Lodge does acknowledge that the film's glizy, coke-fed party sequences that achieve a sort of "Eurotrash-Gatsby pull even as they repel us" thanks to cinematography by Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) who "drives his camera kinetically through crowds, strobe lights, excessively feathered decor and curtains of sulphur-yellow smoke" in ways that "more or less succeed." In other words all the flash, whether needed or not, still works.

Rooney hits home when he points to Enea's surfeit of "flashy technique" and "ostentatious stylistic flourishes". All this Italian glitz and world-wearyness worked once, of course, but that was when the stylists showing off and delineating modern boredom and soullessness were Fellini and Antonioni. The trouble is, and this is the Italian artist's burden, it has all been done already, and by great ones. And what's with the feel-good wedding and renewal of vows sequence at the end?

And yet I was rooting for Pietro Castellitto all the way. I wanted him to succeed in achieving a brilliant film that's a grand statement about modern Italian decadence and disillusion. As the worldly-wise gangster Giordano says, life is short. You must try. Ambition is admirable. But then the magpie critics will come and shit on you, like the pigeon that splatters Enea's face when he's lying on the lawn one day. However Deadline says the film is "overstuffed but never dull." Lee Marshall in Screen Daily calls the young director - the youngest of Venice this year - "a talent to watch." Whether or not that's true, Enea has numerous watchable moments, and ambition to spare.

Enea, 117 mins., debuted at Venice (like his first film as a director) Sept. 5, 2023, opening theatrically in Italy Jan. 11, 2024; Screened for this review as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center (May 30-Jun. 6, 2024). Showtimes at the Walter Reade Theater:
Tuesday, June 4 at 3:30pm
Thursday, June 6 at 6:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERTA TORRE: MI FANNO MALE I CAPELLI (2023)


ALBA ROHRWACHER IN MI FANNI MALE I CAPELLI

Movie love madness in a tour de force by Alba Rohrwacher

Award-winning Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, sister of director Alice Rohrwacher - the two are known for their collaborations in The Wonders and Happy As Lazzaro - gets to give her all in Mi fanno male i capelli ("My Hair Hurts"), a rather slight film that is essentially an extended mad scene. Rohrwacher plays Monica, a woman losing her memory and replacing real recollections with manufactured ones. In a far-fetched but cinematic conceit, the new memories are largely based on snatches of old films featuring Monica Vitti, the great Italian actress of the Sixties who among other things was the muse of directorial great Michelangelo Antonioni.

Some viewers will wish that we were simply watching Monica Vitti in her prime, an image that is magical, evokes the best days of Italian cinema, and. never tires. Although Rohrwacher puts great energy into her performance as the madwoman Vitti acolyte and is well aided by the staff of Roberto Torre's film with hair, makeup, and costume (by Massimo Cantini Parrini), constantly changing and mimicking scenes from various Monica Vitti films that include ones co-featuring Marcello Mastroianni and Alain Delon such as L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, and Il Deserto rosso, these tend, as mimicry, to disappoint by reminding us how unique and special the real Monica Vitti was. Rohrwacher has energy and technical skill; Vitti had panache and charisma, that unique je ne sais quoi her imitator here lacks.

But to appreciate the oddly titled Mi fanno male i capelli (which echoes a line in Antonioni's gloomyIl deserto rosso) we must disregard this discrepancy and focus instead on the cunning ways the film morphs in and out of clips and interweaves them with Rohrwacher's improvised mad scenes. The Rohrwacher "Monica" frequently changes from dark brunette to blonde, as does Vitti in the clips. For a while the mad Monica comes to believe that she is talking to frequent costar Alberto Sordi (his voice somewhat unconvincingly immitated offscreen), and she fashions an extended fantasy that Sordi has invited her to officiate at a grand reception at his home.

Meanwhile a less developed, and rather less engaging, "real" subplot - to anchor the flimsy scenario in a harsh reality - unfolds, involving the mad Monica's husband Edoardo (Filippo Timi), and his financial woes. He has transferred them from a Rome house to one by the sea where it is more "quiet" but major debts and a breached contract are threatening to force relinquishment of the Roman property. His mother is urging him that he needs to transfer his wife to a sanatorium while he seems to enjoy having her roam free with her fantasies and her role-playing. The filmmakers do too. Their and Alba Rohrwacher's fantasy has its moments. But it burns itself out quickly and the film's 83 minutes are more than enough.

Beside the hair, costume, and makeup help, the Wong Kar-wai composer Shigeru Umebayashi provides a warm and glowing musical background. The seaside moments are evocative and so is a sequence when "Monica" wanders off into a sunbaked seaside movie house whose big screen magically is showing the cinematic Monica.

Rohrwacher impersonated another Italian film great last year, playing the elusive Third Man star Alida Valli in Saverio Costanzo's Finalmente Alba. Reports (on Letterboxd) are that that one also features a lion in flight toward the end, an odd coincidence, and, the Letterboxd contributor thinks, both bad movies.

Mi fanno male i capelli, 83 mins., debuted Oct. 19, 2023 at the Rome Film Festival (xnot included at Venice), Italian theatrical release Oct. 20. Screened for this review as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center (May 30-Jun. 6, 2024). Showtimes at the Walter Reade Theater:
Sunday, June 2 at 7:00pm


THE REAL MONICA VITTI: HER HAIR NEVER HURT (EXCEPT IN RED DESERT)

[Chris Knipp]

PAOLA CORTELLESI: THERE'S STILL TOMORROW/C'È ANCORA DOMANI (2023)


PAOLA CORTELLESI, ROMANA MAGGIORA VERGANO, VALERIO MASTANDREA, GIANMARCO FILIPPINI, MATTIA BALDO; SEATED, GIORGIO COANGELI IN THERE'S STILL TOMORROW

Neorealist style attack on patriarchy hits us over the head, yet is spot-on

There is no subtlety to this film shot in black and white and set in an impoverished 1946 Rome, and none intended. When the brutal dolt of a husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea ) wakes up in bed, the first thing he does is slap his wife, Delia (Paola Cortellesi) hard across the face. She is not only a mere servant for her husband, her life a string of wearying day-to-day jobs and devices to scrape together a little money, but he continually mocks and abuses her. She is just chattel to him. Despite a lingering romance with Nino (Vinicio Marchioni), a mechanic in the neighborhood who could have been a decent partner and still wants her to run off with him as he migrates to the North,, Delia feels utterly trapped. Much of the film is a detailed picture of impoverished postwar Roman life and woman's place at the bottom of it.

More tellingly, conversation between the eldest daughter Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano) and her fiance Giulio (Francesco Centorame) reveals that she will be chattel for him. He tells her henceforth she will wear makeup only for him and not for work, and after marriage, she'll no longer work. "You're mine," he says, and her mother hears, and sees him grab her by the neck the same way Ivano grabs her. Mutual violence is softened a little for us by being presented halfway as a dance. Everyone fights, and the younger kids use coarse, abusive language they've learned from their male elders, who include faux-invalid, menacing grandfather Ottorino (Giorgio Colangeli).

The mother, the main character in this film, is played by Paola Cortellesi, the writer-director, who is also a famous and popular comedienne and singer renowned throughout Italy who has long had such themes on her mind, says a New York TImes article that recounts the enormous influence and popularity of this film in the home country, where it outdid Barbie, and beyond. It has reportedly done quite well in France: though the critical response is only an AlloCiné 3.2 (64%), the French spectators score is a whopping 4.3 (86%). It's one of Italy's ten all-time highest grossing films, but not only that: it's become a tool of instruction and debate nation-wide. It touches a nerve. Patriarchy is alive and well in Italy but the public is now ready to look hard at that.

It's useless therefore to say this movie is extremely harsh and crude, and beside the point: its account of poor women's postwar daily lives is detailed, and beside that, it's also frequently funny. More debatable, however, is its plotline's manipulative side. Delia (Cortellesi's character) forms a bond with Black American Occupation forces MP William (Yonv Joseph) by restoring to him the only family photo he has, which is like gold for him, and he offers to help her any way she wants. This sets him up as a deus ex machina, permitting Delia to save Marcella from Giulio and thus from the cycle of abuse she has been locked into for so long. (There are younger kids coming up.)

This film is more editorializing than art, but quality nonetheless went into its making. The presence of the excellent Valerio Mastandrea as evil husband Ivano points to a cast that's fine all down the line. Exterior street scenes likewise show a meticulous historical accuracy that permeates the film, and the many minor characters populating those scenes with their pervasive Roman dialect are hilarious and spot-oh. A score consisting of blatantly contemporary songs helps underline the tongue-in-cheek anachronism of the whole concept of the film. There's something positively Brechtian. You can't look away for a second, or be lulled into identification or get lost in the fiction. Every minute is a message steeped in specificity, the final one being the day when women first got the vote in Italy and turned out en masse. This is a new type of film, not one we may have the appetite for much more of, but one extremely effective for now. It will be interesting to see if There's Still Tomorrow makes any waves on these shores as it has in France.

C'è ancora domnani/There's Still Tomorrow, 118 mins., debuted at Rome Film Festival Oct. 18, 2023, in Italian cinemas from Oct. 26 and was showered with awards. French theatrical release Mar. 13, 2024 (AlloCiné scores 3.2 press, 4.3 spectators. Screened for this review as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center (May 30-Jun. 6, 2024). Showtimes at the Walter Reade Theater:
Thursday, May 30 at 4:00pm
Monday, June 3 at 6:00pm
Thursday, June 6 at 8:45pm