July 13, 2021 4:17 pm
Three floors marks the long-awaited return to fiction and narration by Nanni Moretti after the splendid documentary on Pinochet’s coup and Italian solidarity, popular but also institutional through the protection of the embassy. We are therefore sorry to see that, for the first time, Moretti has disappointed us. Mind you, there are many beautiful things in the film that reveal the usual subtlety and complexity behind the apparent simplicity.
In adapting Eshkol Nevo’s novel of the same name, the Roman director impresses from the very first shot, as black as the night and the asphalt. The opening scene of the car accident that causes the death of a woman leaves you speechless and is a mini-concentrate of our fears, of this constant catastrophe anxiety that has gripped us from 11 September onwards. Global fears, of course, but which turn into a very particular mixture here with us due to our peculiar petty bourgeois culture. That petty bourgeois culture so much investigated by Italian cinema and of which Moretti offers us a new portrait.
Three plans that correspond to as many variations on the inability to be fathers and, in the specific case, three variations on the failure of the Italian male. There is the father who is good but physically absent, who creates an almost post-partum depression in his wife; there is the obsessively rigid father in his role because he is convinced that being an upright magistrate can be fine, even if to the detriment of the human being, thus generating a monster son; and finally there is the father with latent obsessions who, in projecting on an elderly pedophile fears of a petty bourgeois, seems to hide something unconfessable.
A great sense of synthesis, which emerges in particular in the editing, gives rise to a dry, almost dry rhythm, allowing the various stories to generate a sort of geometry with musical accents on a whirlwind of progressive failures and mourning inserted over a very long temporality. , thus creating a movement of time that coincides, thanks to the direction, with a movement of space. And this after an apparent immobility, a chill of the world. Direction and photography know how to be serious, gloomy and aerial at the right moment.
And yet other no less important elements undermine its full success. The construction of most of the characters is too schematic, in a manner, devoid of real intensity and not far from many medium-sized television dramas. The character of the judge is a cliché and Moretti, who plays him, perhaps for the first time adds nothing. The elderly man seems to have come out of a consoling television fiction. In particular, the dark side of the pedophilia-obsessed father, played by Riccardo Scamarcio, is devoid of any strength. From the beginning, the dialogues are intended to be simple and concise, but they often reveal a crude, sometimes heavy banality, which still refers to the most obvious television fiction.
In this jumble of stereotypes, the splendid character of the mother of the boy-monster and wife of the magistrate-monster, played by Margherita Buy, is not enough, who gets older the more springtime becomes and is basically a savior who faces a painful via crucis for everyone. This woman full of anxieties, for a long time subjected to the male will, but who in the end is reborn becoming a bit Madonna and a bit Christ, nevertheless fails to completely save a deranged film that begins with death and an upcoming birth in the night. and ends in daylight, in the illumination of (re) births.
It would be important to discover new strong, singular authors, in sync with other countries without waiting for the eventual Palme d’Or as happened for Bong Joon-ho with Parasite. For some years we have been talking more and more about the Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi. His Drive my car it is an extraordinary film founded on the relationships of a community, the actors of a play, and on a quality of dialogue that is the opposite of Moretti’s film, since the numerous silences also speak here. In place of the condominium there is an elegant red car. And there is an actor and theater director husband and a screenwriter wife who tells him the stories while they are on the move: in the car – the main “place” of the film – and in bed while they are making love. Record audio cassettes for him to help him memorize the lyrics.
But suddenly she is gone. His death leaves a void that the husband tries to fill with his voice in the car, almost owned by his wife. But through her absence, the director will better discover the others, the opposites: the actors he chooses come from almost all of Asia and speak in their own language. And a girl who speaks becomes fundamental, such is her strength, sign language. The pièce is, moreover, it Zio Vanja of the Russian Chekhov and he is away to Hiroshima, the city of memory and pain. Everything is located elsewhere, everything is always in motion even in the apparent immobility in this mysterious, spiritual film with almost infinite layers of reading.
Benedetta it’s a masterpiece. The film by Dutchman Paul Verhoeven did not disappoint, for several years transplanted to Hollywood and adopted by the French with It, product like Benedetta from the French naturalized Tunisian Saïd Ben Saïd (France, it is important to note, is the last European country to have maintained a true film industry). Because this new work of his on the global perversion of mankind seems to suggest that this does not necessarily prevent the achievement of spiritual elevation.
Verhoeven seems to want to tell us that there is a true, profound correlation between mysticism and sexuality, almost indissoluble. It is a film that grows by digging into the interior of the viewer. Even this true story, absolutely incredible, which tells of a forbidden love between two nuns and set in Renaissance Italy in the monastery of the city of Pescia, near Florence, is a reflection on the cruelty inherent in excessively rigid, familiar roles or public offices or, as here, determined by religious dogmas. And we return with our thoughts to Moretti’s film.
The figurative force of mystical situations even within a sober, if not austere global visual setting, the ability to play with trash – a constant of his poetics – through dreams that seem reality while maintaining a subtle balance between sensation of grotesque and profound disquiet, the ambiguity of the boundary between (self) manipulation and true transcendence, between madness and rationality, are among the most important elements of a story that will surely cause controversy but which, this matters, will make us reflect.
Cabin No. 6 (Compartment n. 6) of the Finnish Juho Kuosmanen is among the revelations of this festival, not only of the competition. A Finnish student makes a long journey on an old Russian railway line, one of those frequented by most common people, from Moscow to freezing Murmansk. In the same compartment he finds a Russian boy who drinks and seems unreliable: it will turn out to be an important and in some ways surprising meeting.
Structured as a long video installation, both visual and sound, mirroring the train compartments, it is a continuous alternation of climaxes divided into compartments according to the areas of the train and especially the places of long stops. At the same time, it is pure cinema and very enjoyable, which manages to capture the viewer’s attention permanently. The finesse in the work of directing (framing, interpretation, editing) and script is remarkable: practically a journey in all the moods of human life and the journey from the exterior thus becomes interior, including the encounters made on the train and especially during the stages, where the great humanity of so many simple and humble people surprises. A film in the name of empathy.
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