Change Your Image
Robertodelagriva
Reviews
I cento passi (2000)
More than a mafia-film, an about mafia or anti-mafia film
This film deserves many reflections (not all of them positive) about both its formal features and content. On the first category I can say, that this is a good film. On the second one I'll have to make a selection and invite you to watch the film and think about it. This film doesn't tell the true story of the facts which involved the true person Peppino Impastato. It isn't his biography. It's just the narration of his life, life understood as the net of relationships of a single person with his environment (territory, family, friends, politics, current contemporary ideas). So we don't watch a documentary film but a tale whose main character is Peppino Impastato, actually we see photos of the real Peppino only at the end oft the film. Nevertheless what Peppino makes through in the film is the representation of true facts. It's very difficult to tell a tale which bases on historical facts. Giordana has already attempted that in La meglio gioventù when he tried to show that history concerns the life of everybody creating an imaginary family, whose life builds the plot of the film, portrayed against the real background of Italian history. In I cento passi the task was more difficult because the narrated historical facts concerned the life of a real single person which were actually the plot of the film: obviously the director could not take many narrative liberties such as the romantic family saga plots in La meglio gioventù. So Giordana takes his liberties in trying to show the interior life of Peppino Impastato and his family. We receive a very impressive account of the possible thoughts and emotions of Peppino's father (sometimes a violent monster, sometimes a sad and lonely looser, conscious that the life of Peppino depends entirely on his own capacity to observe the mafia code, and, at least in this way, caring father) and a more sober representation of his mother and his brother (who are still alive). This tale of the relationships between the people who lived these true facts 30-40 years ago is in the end a reflection about the cruelty of the inhumane situation which everybody had to pull through when living in a mafia world: for example Peppino has to make radical and sad decisions and his father has to humiliate himself all his life long. That's why I say, that this is not a mafia film but a film about mafia or an anti-mafia film. Mafia doesn't mean the "Godfathers universe" (the mafia organization itself) but the systematical repression of liberty, which involves the progressive destruction of beauty (as Peppino says, sure not literally, in a very touching and peaceful scene of the film) and the following disorientation (not to say impossibility) of the self evolution. One of the first consequences of the contact with the mafia for the life of someone, in whatever form this may take place, is a lack of communication. So tries Peppino (who cannot speak with his father, as we see in their last very poor conversation) to reach so many people as possible with a broadcasting (Radio Aut), the cinema club or the itinerant theater. At a certain point in his fight he has to break with with Stefano Venuti, whose politics were too far from the people and with the superficial hippies, whose ideas were irrelevant for the territory. His efforts to liberate himself show the awareness of the impossibility of doing it in a merely private sphere which is separated from a meaning-full, beauty-full, humane environment. This, at least, makes his life (and we must thank Giordana for making a film about it) universally relevant.
Caruso Pascoski di padre polacco (1988)
Redefining the Italian macho
The film is indeed a good comedy. It's not Billy Wilder but at least has a basic charm of sensitive and intelligent laughs. The screen-play springs out of the ambitious project of re-definition of the Italian male. At least from the narrative side of it the thing holds. The first image we have from Caruso in the opening scene is the symbol of the crisis of his role as middle class husband; he is completely drunk in a very elegant restaurant in the center of Florence in the opulent socialist Italy of the 80's. There is no mystery about the reasons which have lead him to this state of crisis: he's been left by his wife. The narrative pattern of the film is the reconstruction, told by Caruso self (who by the way is a psychoanalyst), of the reasons and causes of his defeat. In this way we get to understand the fact that between 1968 and 1970 the so called "sentimental education" of Caruso was merely based on the last words of his father (who was an Italian communist) "Caruso, tear her knickers!". That is why he is not able to have a grown up and responsible kind of relationship with "modern" women in general and with his wife in particular. Defeated in his private life he develops a persecution complex (the scene with the barkeeper and the one with the violent child). To regaining his wife (and his peace of mind!) he is forced to reconstruct his identity. In his first attempt dressing women's clothes (in order to seduce his own wife) and in so achieving the role of the unfaithful wife, in his second attempt he almost accepts an homosexual contact with his wife's lover. In the end his wife goes back to him and Caruso regains his happiness, which nevertheless remains obviously unstable. The quality of the film is weakened through too many unnecessary gags which do fit in the genre of comedies directed by a comedian himself but do distract the audience from the narrative focus of the story. Maybe a 3rd person narrator would have given a better perspective offering the audience more distance and in this way these particular gags would no more distract the attention but reinforce and focus it. However 1st person narrative gives to the story more liveness, lightness and it helps to de-dramatize it, with a kind of self-irony which is impossible for 3rd person narrative to achieve in this way. Besides the 1st person narrative mimes a psychoanalysis session where the narrator is the patient and the audience the psychoanalyst.
Perduto amor (2003)
A pleasure for the senses
Battiato seems terrific familiar with a medium you would think he's not familiar with such as Cinema. "Perduto Amore" is not a musical but music means a lot to this film. I'm not speaking of music as the traditional accompanying part of the soundtrack (which in this film is fulfilled in a very sober way)but of music as a subject matter and symbol of the sublime. In the same way play a very relevant role philosophy, magic and beauty (in several social forms such as aristocracy, music and art scene, not-yet-emancipated-women-of-low-classes, who already find a way to a responsible and conscious life in their daily things, and just simple events). The main character's perspective leads most of the time but sometimes the perspective shifts to the audience's. The screen shows the impossible geography of a dream (which is the whole film- and life as an off-voice says at the very beginning of the film). Language is almost as relevant as music and the function of the figure's voices is if not realistic surely thought provoking and clearly one of Battiato's greatest achievements. "Perduto amore" is a great pleasure for the eyes (light and impossible geography)and for the ears (music and language). I think, this film proves that art is more than the simply mastery of the medium.