Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2024

[Chris Knipp]

MARGARITA ROSA DE FRANCISCO AND EDOARDO PESCE IN EL PARAÍSO

ENRICO MARIA ARTALE: EL PARAÍSO (2023)


Bonds that destroy

Edoardo Pesce, who played Simone, the terrifying thug in Matteo Garrone's 2018 Dogman, is even more central to Enrico Maria Artale's strange El Paraiso. This time tragic family dysfunction is the theme. Pesce's character Julio Cesar lives on the water, near Fiumicino, on the outskirts of Rome with his mother (Margarita Rosa de Francisco), Colombian and illegal, and they survive by cutting drugs for their coke dealer/importer friend Lucio (Gabriel Montesi). Then Ines (Maria del Rosario), a young first-time drug mule, arrives and stays with them. Julio's attraction to her spurs a rift in his cloying bond with his mother - a tie the filmmaker has called "complex, morbid, full of love but full of obsession at the same time" - and then a sudden tragedy leads to Julio's decline and fall. We leave him in a limbo that is more a hell than the "Paradise" of the title.

When the film begins Julio and his mother go dancing. The mixture of Spanish and Italian they speak heightens the sense of their private world and their confused relationship: they seem almost on a date, and at their best moments, though this cannot be healthy, they are like lovers rather than mother and son. When a man cuts in and dances with the mother, it feels as if a rift, a jealousy is threatened. The mother is dominant, a little crazy, and drug-addicted. She is not quite of the world; she is in her own world. Her rug-chewing performance is breathtaking and operatic, and the simulation of a native Spanish-speaker by this Italian actress is convincing (and won a best actress award in the Orizzonti section at Venice), though Edoardo Pesce's more imploded turn winds up feeling more convincing and solid, even though his character is lost, as it must be, since ultimately this is all about him. This is a striking and original film, hovering uneasily on the edges of realism and lurid expressionist nightmare.

To say this film is "realistic" seems misleading. It has an intense physicality and grubbiness (to put it mildly) but it goes far enough into the extremes of psychological dysfunction to skirt the edges of nightmare: the garish pastels of Francesco Di Giacomo's intense cinematography heighten this effect. Its main characters live in a bubble. In her Screen Daily Venice review Nikki Baughan suggests the film "explores just how isolating the immigrant experience can be." Friends I watched this with at Lincoln Center's Open Roads Italian series compared El Paraiso with David Michôd's great Australian film Animal KIngdom, and to compare Jacki Weaver with Rosa de Francisco would would be interesting: but the two films are opposites. Here there is no real family, only a warped Oedipal bond.

El Paraiso is drawn dangerously over the top right from the beginning, but it doesn't allow you to look away. It excels is in its grubby physicality. Julio is waiting outside a women's toilet for his mother in the opening scene. This side of the film most shows in its vivid depiction of the ugly sides - emphatically plural - of being a drug mule. When Julio gets on a plane, naturally he would have never flown before - he has lived a deeply restricted existence; and his extreme behavior brings out every discomfort you may have felt about flyinrg. The discomfort of his existence with his mother is brought out in multiple ways. Earlier, he repeatedly lies in bed watching masturbatory porn on his laptop, but always has to clap it shut to hide it from his mother. His mother ruthlessly attacks him for his furtive visits to local prostitutes. Physical events stand out. Riding too fast in their motor boat with Ines, the mother's hat flies suddenly off. Returning from an outing with Ines, he and she have traded jackets and her too tight one rips out the shoulder as they climb into the house like kids on a romp. Most grubbily and horrifyingly physical of all is what happens to some ashes in an urn.

All this is far too deliberately unappetizing and repellant to be seen as simply naturalistic, and this film not for everyone. Even when one is impressed one may be mentally holding everything very much at arms length. But if Rosa de Francisco's admired performance seems too operatic, Pesce's is memorable and convincing. Casting someone so solid for the role of a weak, lost soul, by avoiding the obvious, proves very effective.

El Paraiso, 106 mins., debuted at Venice in the Horizons section Sept. 3, 2023, where it won the Best Actress, Best Screenplay, and Young Cinema awards. Screened for this review as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series (May 31-Jun. 6, 2024) at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Saturday, June 1 at 1:00pm – Q&A with Enrico Maria Artale
Tuesday, June 4 at 6:00pm