Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2014

[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.