Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2024

[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) while he lasts 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 by the set designer - 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. In a devastating review inHollywood Reporter at Venice, David Rooney called c this film "a soulless bit of self-indulgence that seems far too pleased with itself" and 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 it has a point or not, still works as spectacle.

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.

On the plus side, 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