cafe Pellicola - window to fine italian cinema

To me this film is a fine example of the power of good storytelling without the need for special effects and pyrotechnics in order to engage audiences. The premise is simple, a lesbian couple returns from a vacation in Tunis and to their great surprise discover a Moroccan guy hidden in their car, with a wish for a better life in Europe. Anna (Maria de Medeiros) the wealthy and more mature decides to help Anis (Mounir Ouadi) against the wish of her partner Mara (Antonia Liskova).

From there the plot unfolds revealing rich tapestry of themes ranging from the audacity to offer genuine help to a stranger, cross-cultural differences regarding family values viewed by Anis, conservative vs. liberal tensions as Anna’s mother questions the validity of her daughter relationship with Mara. And finally, the pure wish of any person to find “shelter” in an environment that provides support and growth.

Such “shelter” can be interpreted as being a person, in this case Anna, who shelters both Anis and Mara or as a place - Europe, as provider of better opportunities for immigrants. To this effect, throughout the film we see a recurring symbol - a giant chair located at the center of a round traffic intersection, through which the actors pass through in their daily commute. You may call it an environmental sculpture, but in our context this chair serves as constant reminder of the most basic human need of finding comfort - the chair, as a tool for rest and shelter.

The film appeared first in Berlin’s Film Festival where director Puccioni immediately found an American distributor, which paved the way to screenings at New York’s MOMA to grand enthusiasm by audiences. The fact that no Italian distributor was found at the time meant the film was practically unknown in its own native country. This indeed serves as bold evidence to the challenges facing Italian cinema directors today when trying to bring new films to the public.

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Open wide spaces of panoramic desert views, soldiers perched high on their guard in an ancient, semi destructed fortress, waiting for an unseen enemy - the tartars - that for years and years never comes. Despite this inactivity, there is a total obedience to rules and regulations in the face of a non-existent enemy, which at times creates social frictions as one fellow soldier forgets the day’s password and get shot by the sentry.

The film brings about a philosophical and I would say timely question, what do you do when you’re surrounded by omni-present threat that never materialized to the point when it finally begins to appear in the horizon - its  occurences are automatically hushed down among the troops in order to retain the status quo of inaction.

There are two options: You can acknowledge danger’s presence and be prepared when it arrives and act; or you can completely ignore it and sink into bored passivity. The choice presented in this film, is literally keeping a middle ground of watching the horizon, yet ignoring what gradually manifested itself.

Sounds familiar no? A lot like what drove our global economy down these days. The signs for the looming tsunami were there all along, but the watch guards chose to ignore their existence completely and treat them as false mirage.

In this classic masterpiece, director Valerio Zurlini adapted Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel, shot in Iran’s Bam enigmatic Citadel, boasting Europe’s most famous actors such as Vittorio Gassman, Philippe Noiret, and Jean-Louis Trintignant. The film was produced by Jacques Perrin, you may recognize by his later role as older Toto in 1988 Cinema Paradiso and brought to life by the tense score of maestro Ennio Morricone.

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Qualunque imposizione faccia su di noi, egli è servo
della Legge e come tale sfugge al giudizio umano
-Kafka

Whatever imposition is brought upon us, it is served
by the law and as such escapes human judgment
-Kafka

Morricone’s pounding soundtrack

In this Oscar-winning masterpiece by director Elio Petri, a head of homicide department in Rome is testing the boundaries of his authority to override a murder he himself committed. Played by the incredible Gian Maria Volontè, after many roles as the villain in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, in this film you’d be amazed by his transformation into an urban mastermind of a murder that no matter how many clues he leaves for his own team to find and outright admissions he makes - his powerful position provides the ultimate shelter.

The film boasts a signature soundtrack by maestro Ennio Morricone, that provides a tense texture with persistent tempo to support on one hand the authoritative police inspector as he toys with his team, the media and even a harmless passerby, and the ongoing investigation - on the other. Interestingly, the rationale for this wry game, as the inspector puts it, is not to mislead his team but to prove his intact above-suspicion status. Above is a fine sample of this classic score.

Worth noting also is the solid delivery of Florinda Bolkan, in the role of Augusta Terzi, the inspector’s lover that can exude both sensual vulnerability, and determination that can easily make cracks in the otherwise bullet-proof power presentation of the inspector, thus bringing him into utter submission. In essence, her role plays a focal point for the whole plot as she constantly populates the inspector’s thoughts, triggering flashbacks to their shared wild relationship.

This photo is a good capture of her intoxicating power over the inspector, pulling him into her web of mind games, teases that leads into a final destruction, while all along using his power as police inspector to supply endless contexts for role-playing the victim vs. the authority:

Such a bold social criticism of corrupted officials you will also find in the earlier work of Francesco Rosi’s Hands over the City - Le Mani Sulla Città (1963). You can see even the use of the same imagery as the potent official sitting in his desk with a background map of his jurisdiction:

From Los Angeles Independent Festival in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles.

Great excitement for this movie which is again from and about Sardinia. The fact that the director was there presenting the film and holding the discussion makes it even more interesting.

Sonetaula is a book by Giuseppe Fiori that he recently re-wrote and shortened. It is set up in a decade between 1938 and 1948 (more or less) in the island of Sardinia, inland, in the shepherd’s most true world.

Sonetaula is the name of our character, in reality a nick name, which means sound of wood, since he was very skinny.

Sonetaula follows the story of many other children in a typical village of Sardinia. He has to help the father to tend his flock, because he has to go to work in a factory in Italy, he would make more money, he said. Poor people, after war, hoping to have a chance to change their lives. However, we will discover that this is not the truth.

Sonetaula is a young boy victim of his culture. In the mountain, in the cold, in the freezing solitude of woods and sheep, one day, founding out that his friends stole one of his sheep he goes and kills 20 of theirs.

It’s a revenge imposed by the shepherd culture, where you have to protect what is yours at all costs and teach others that you are stronger.

This act will mark his life and his future won’t have chances for salvation, unfortunately. Rejected now by a people that is trying to emerge from its millenary absence from the evolution, that is rejecting its archaic pastoral existence rules, Sonetaula is left alone with his life of bandit.

Maybe only 23 or 24 years old, Sonetaula, unable to trust and surrender to justice because too far from his known living codes, he plays his last card making an escape agreement with an ‘important person’, the ingegnere. A person reasonably trusted because of his high social position that, instead, has other interests than saving a poor shepherd life.

This movie has of course the charm of a neorealist movie. They took one year to shoot it, in real places, with real people, I mean non professional actors, and with real seasons, the director says. A photography very effective though, with major technological touches, maybe too many to be authentically neorealist. Nevertheless, valuable for its strong ability to make looks, silences, thoughts, feelings, talk.

However, Salvatore Mereu is not giving his true poetry, like he did in Ballo a Tre Passi. Fair enough, we know he will again.