On 9 September at 7 pm, the official screening of ChiaraSusanna Nicchiarelli’s film which offers a radical and political vision of the life of Saint Clare and Saint Francis, completes the picture of the Italian films in competition at the 79th edition of the Venice Film Festival.
An edition that ideally leaves the pandemic behind: no more limitations of seats in the halls, only highly recommended masks, bars, restaurants and packed red carpets.
To open the dance, the first of the five Italian films in competition (an Italian-American co-production to tell the truth) was Bones and all by Luca Guadagnino. This film is also about two special boys, but we could not be more distant from the story of the two “rebels” of Assisi.
Based on the novel young adult To the boneby Camille DeAngelis, Bones and all tells the story of Maren (Taylor Russel) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), two young men who, in order to survive, are forced to eat human flesh (practically vampires) and who cross North America in search of of Maren’s mother but also of their place in the world.
Along the way they meet other cannibals, learn that family isn’t always the answer to everything, and discover love. With this road movie sentimental horror, Guadagnino faced large spaces and a certain imaginary of American cinema, an encounter that until now he had postponed. And he did it by keeping everything under control, confirming his dimension as an international author and his freedom, in his choices and expressions.
It is also set in the United States Monica, the third feature film by Andrea Pallaoro, another author who has found his creative dimension abroad. The protagonist of the film is precisely Monica (Trace Lysette), a woman who, after many years of being away, decides to reunite with her family to assist her sick mother.
Since she left home, however, Monica has faced a path of gender transition, and she is no longer the person who left the house where she grew up, so much so that her mother does not even recognize her. Monica is therefore in the almost enviable position of being able to go back in time, incognito. Too bad it would be very important for her to be recognized by her mother for what she has become. Pallaoro has made very specific stylistic choices and, aided by the convincing performance of Trace Lysette, reaches the end of his path without ever getting hurt or hurt.
Even the one made by Emanuele Crialese with his The immensity it is a journey into memory. Much more personal, however, because it speaks of the memory and history of the author himself, who took the opportunity of this film to reveal his transition path to the world. Little Adriana (Luana Giuliani), who dresses as a boy and prefers to be called Andrea, is a precise projection of the author, who has repeatedly reiterated that what the film tells is his personal story.
We are at the end of the sixties, Adriana lives in a traditional family with her mother (Penelope Cruz), father (Vincenzo Amato) and two brothers. A family like many others, with a father always absent from work and a generous and somewhat nonconformist mother trapped in the bourgeois cage and therefore perhaps condemned to depression.
If someone found some choices excessive (in my case the use of a shared television memory, especially in the first third of the film), someone else preferred to emphasize a certain consistency in Crialese’s choices and his ability to build a finite universe, even if imperfect, how can a child’s memories be.
Much more classic formally the last film of this small review, that is The lord of the ants. The merits of Gianni Amelio’s film, released in theaters on 8 September, are worthy of merit. First of all to tell the story of Aldo Braibanti, partisan, intellectual, poet, writer and myrmecologist (ie scholar and expert on ants), victim of a great injustice at the end of the sixties. In 1968 Braibanti was in fact sentenced to four years in prison for “plagiarism”, in practice for having brainwashed a boy. A crime that in a few years would have been canceled from the penal code.
Another merit of the Lord of the ants it is to never try to trigger the emotions of the audience, but rather to give them all the elements to evaluate a unique and absurd episode in Italy during the boom. An example of this coldness is evident when the process is reconstructed. In fact, in the courtroom, there will be no passionate speeches, of those to which US cinema has accustomed us, but we will not be able to help but notice the distance between the facts and their deviated reconstruction.
To help the director in this enterprise Luigi Lo Cascio, who in the role of Braibanti never dampens what were uncomfortable elements of the character of the Emilian intellectual, the young Leonardo Maltese (whom Amelio defined as “a miracle”) who plays with great naturalness the boy “plagiarized” by the homosexual Braibanti, and finally Elio Germano in the role of a journalist of the Unit who clashes with the bigotry present even in the PCI of the time, highlighting an attitude that is contradictory to say the least of the “great workers’ party “Towards homosexuality.