Four young teenagers or so in Italy at the turn of the 80s and 90s are not in tune with the world around them: they are sons and daughters of the “best” society, of deputies and important personalities, but their sensibilities they make them hopelessly far from what they “should” be (“Normal, like us”, says the mother of one of them disconsolately).
Annarita Zambrano’s second work, “Rossosperanza”, tries to tell their discomfort and the way in which their non-conformity is also, in some way and at the cost of further suffering, their salvation. Zena, Marzia, Alfonso and Adriano are four examples among many possible: as a last resort, their families lock them up in a villa where it is said that forced re-education can redeem them in a decisive way. Or not, but at that point the responsibility would rest with the young people themselves…
The ideas are there and some solutions work very well, such as the animated ads to support the story of one of the back stories of the four protagonists (too bad it’s only a few seconds insert: the work of Alessandro Rak and Dario Sansone would have deserved more ), or the growing awareness of the general situation, of conformism and moralism capable of hiding the worst backgrounds.
If the villa in which they are locked up seems hardly credible (but the film is presented as a “black comedy”, so some exaggerations can be imagined as intentional), it should be emphasized that a simple gimmick works well, that of using the same actor – Andrea Sartoretti – in different roles but always as the father of troubled young people, evident assignment of generational blame by the author.
Margherita Morellini, Leonardo Giuliani, Ludovica Rubino, Luca Varone are the four young men chosen for the main roles: they have the right faces, but perhaps only Giuliani already demonstrates a degree of maturity suitable for the undertaking. The work of Elia Nuzzolo seems better, who here is Zena’s stuttering brother but will soon be on the small screen in the role that can change a career, that of Max Pezzali in the Sydney Sibilia series on 883.
“Rossosperanza” struggles to mesh with a slow and somewhat rambling first part, but rewind after rewind (it is the dj of the group, Zena, who by manipulating her all red vinyls guides the chronological back and forth of the story) becomes a cross-section interesting on a piece of society that has certainly already been analyzed several times by the cinema but always a source of non-trivial food for thought.
10/08/2023, 18:35
Carlo Griseri