Welcome Venice, a moving elegy for a betrayed beauty – Goffredo Fofi

Assisted by an attentive and gifted screenwriter such as Marco Pettenello (Padua 1973), Andrea Segre (Dolo 1976) continues in his necessary undertaking to narrate a contemporaneity that is generally suffocated by journalistic banality, by our own commonplaces. Extremely: Salvinians (obscene) and Veltronians (pathetic).

I am convinced that Andrea Segre is better (and more useful to us) for his feature films than for his documentaries. The first snow, I am Li, and especially The order of things have faced, from or on almost always north-eastern backgrounds, central themes of our present, the contradictions that are of our society and its various and heavy egoisms, the dilemmas that we should face, and that indeed we would have long had to face in a less chaotic way and irresponsible, both the rulers and the ruled …

Welcome Venice it has two limits, not “political”, and fortunately has many advantages and greater. The first comes from a certain redundancy: the situation is immediately clear, but we go back and return insisting on things already said and that the viewer understood very quickly, in the evolution of the story and in the presentation of the characters.

Blackmailing reasons
It is basically the conflict between two brothers who come from a lineage of fishermen (moeche breeders, edible lagoon spiders) but one of whom, Pietro, has dedicated himself to something else, eager for money and therefore to sell off to tourists – we are to Giudecca – a beauty that is also history, and that is also family history and that is a tradition and a morality, the paternal house of which he shares the property with his brother; who (Alvise) resists as best he can his flattery and those of others, some more and some less eager to exploit tourism, in the need that everyone says they have for money with the most varied justifications, especially of a family nature (children, children!). Various and still blackmailing reasons, and it is no coincidence that the most “positive” and lovable characters end up being a dying patriarch and a growing boy …

Alvise is Andrea Pennacchi, Pietro is Paolo Pierobon, surrounded by a group of actors who pass easily from language to dialect, and mix them as has long been customary; credible and effective, especially the protagonists, in a context that is family and of several generations, and which is also neighborhood and neighborhood, but no longer “campiello”. In the end, the blackmail of money wins, and Alvise even agrees to move his home and family to Mestre, in “continental” Italy, beyond the great straight line that seems to rest on the sea.

In the midst of these encounters and clashes, between circulating and frantic dialogues, at the bottom of this conflict that also has dramatic moments in the relationship between the two brothers (even when civilized, the Caines and the Abels continue to be the eternal paradigm of mankind ) there is, fortunately, also the wonder of nature, there is light and there are the colors of the sea and the earth, of the dawns of the middays of the sunsets, beautifully and lovingly photographed.

Beyond a certain repetitiveness of the situations, which dampens the evidence and the drama, it could harm the film from being somehow overcome by the facts, with the impression that it derives from it that things that have happened for some time are being reported. Not new and that, Venetians or not, we knew in part. The battle for Venice has been lost, it seems to me, for decades now, even though many speak, certainly with reason, of a current upsurge. Of an extreme battle in progress.

This passionate and moving elegy about a mutation as hateful as it is economically and historically and sociologically fatal, arouses in the viewer a great melancholy: for the “beauty” (Zanzotto would have said) of which we are children and that we have betrayed or are ending, precisely in these years, to betray.