Nisimazine Venice 2014 #2

Nisimazine

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review 3st September 2014

VENICE

the magazine by NISI MASA - European Network of Young Cinema

La vita oscena Belluscone-Una storia siciliana Manglehorn Senza Nessuna PietĂ from La vita oscena by Michele Alhaique

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Editorial September came in full swing in Venice, and that’s not half bad, as there’s no better season than the fall to put us all in a movie-watching mood (in case we weren’t there already).

Everything tends to turn meditative too, we’re more prone to find ourselves like Roy Andersson’s pigeon- on a branch, reflecting on existence.

I for one got to thinking about reality, more precisely, the way it is shaped by the films at the festival. For a while cinema was all about gritty, raw realism. Slices of life became not only a topic, but also a style. My compatriots (directors of the Romanian “New Wave”) had quite a bit to do with that tendency, but it’s safe to say that they were far from being alone. And while that way of exploring through cinema is not over and done with just yet, the counter-current is forming and gathering strength.

One could say that this has always been there (and going strong) because of Hollywood productions and other films with high commercial value. But the counter-current around here comes from a different route than the escapist one. It’s not a making up for a ‘reviewed and improved’ version of reality, but it’s rather disillusioned with it, just as much as it seems to be with the fantasy alternative. This is no Fellini-

CREDITS NISIMAZINE VENICE 26/08 - 6/09 2014 Edition of 3st September 2014 esque life like a circus.

Take Birdman- the character oscillates between two realities, both of which are fairly far from being ideal. Either road he chooses, he has to sacrifice a part of himself. Then there’s Reality; sprung from Quentin Dupieux’s twisted imagination, it treats reality, fantasy and dream as watercolors that mix freely until the original tints are indistinguishable. Nothing is either what it is, nor what it seems to be. An abundance of dead ends. Last, but not least, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence delivers Andersson’s signature brand of weirdness. Even when staged like an absurd theater play, with drily delivered lines and imagination barging in at every step, we can recognize reality more than we would like to admit.

“A thing is the thing, not what is said about the thing.” a message on Regan Thompson’s mirror says in Birdman. Our dreams and imagination are also ‘things’ like that, and we can’t always talk ourselves into discharging them as trivial or unimportant, even if this makes reality harder to bare. The anxiety of the modern man reigns queen at the Venice Film Festival!

by Mirona Nicola (Romania)

EDITORIAL STAFF Director Fernando Vasquez Coordinator Mirona Nicola Layout Francesca Merlo Contributors to this issue Tara Karajica, Marta Tudisco, Fernando Vasquez, Martin I. Petrov, Mirona Nicola, Elena Aya Bountouraki (photographer), Francesca Merlo (photographer) NISI MASA European Network of Young Cinema 99 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis 75010, Paris, France +33 (0)1 48 01 65 31 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com www.nisimazine.eu A magazine published by NISI MASA in the framework of a film journalism workshop for young Europeans Special thanks to Michela Lazzarin and Alberto Barbera

With the support of the Youth in Action of the European Union. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

© Elena Aya Bountouraki

Picture of the day

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review

The obscene life (La vita oscena) Renato De Maria, ITALY - Orizzonti Common knowledge: Teenagers hate their life, the world, the planet. They want to experiment, to try drugs, to have sex. This is all good as long as you don’t interfere in their zone of freedom and their illusionistic dreamland. If you decide to do so and you don’t know how to decipher their psychology and their view of life, you’ve lost the battle.

Italian director Renato De Maria finds inspiration in the autobiographical book of the Italian poet and writer Aldo Nove, a story focusing on his turbulent teenage years and early adulthood. After losing both his parents at the age of 17, Andrea (Clément Métayer) cannot find the purpose of life within his everyday routine. His sense of reality and his ability to draw lines between past, present and future is suddenly gone, replaced by a constant entrapment into the delirium of depression and ignorance. Determined to end his life, he buys 17 grams of cocaine – each for every year of his life, perhaps – and takes his position into a marathon with death, desperately trying to terminate second. But for some reason, the universe tries to keep him alive.

Staring with an original approach and making clear from the beginning that surrealism will have the upper hand in his aesthetic choices, De Maria picks up French teen Clément Métayer to incarnate his vision of Andrea, whose thoughts and memories we follow within the lines of his continuous narration in past and present. Future is never an option for obvious reasons. The camera is constantly observing him as an alienated version of human being that is lost somewhere in the societal chaos. Métayer tries really hard to bring out his inner teen spirit but no matter how much coke he smirks, his part remains lifeless and the narrative has a rather descending climax.

With sparse dialogues and poetic notes from Aldo Nove’s existential scripts, it is hard to establish an interactive ground with the characters. The mother figure is almost constantly present in Andrea’s imagination and dreams,

played here by the director’s life partner Isabella Ferrari, and being the only partly developed character after the protagonist’s. The relationship between mother and son is given through several flashbacks of sincere and melancholic emotion exchange, probably the only parts of the film where Métayer manages to jump out of the screen’s dimensions.

De Maria seems determined to give full potential to his character’s teen obscenity, spending almost one third of the film on Andrew’s sexual experimentation, shown in ways that reminds us so much of Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza.

Bizarrely superficial and awkward, this eroticism seems like a clumsy mishmash directed by Sorrentino’s rich, poshy dolls – as we can recall them from Jep Gambardella’s furious parties - who would change their career orientation in split seconds, becoming poets from actresses or directors from poets, obviously incapable of any.

For a director like De Maria, who has worked both in television and cinema it is unavoidable to integrate some stylistic habits from the one to the other and vice versa. The long and monotonous scenes are not really helpful when constructing a biopic. Slightly balanced by De Maria’s interesting cinematographic approach, the film ends up being a colourful, psychedelic journey on a teenager’s skateboard, but sadly it stays there. Filtered, well polished images provide a great start, but then they give way to a stiff, rigid and overly surreal 80 minutes, where the director’s interpretation of a teen’s life never achieves its goal.

Hard to tell if it’s the limited flexibility of the plot, the rather spasmodic acting or the adaptation of the particular biography itself, but certainly La vita oscena doesn’t reach the high standard that De Maria had initially designed in his mind.

by Martin I. Petrov (Greece)

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review

combination of fragments from newscasts, interviews, newspapers, archival footages and TV programs, lets the truth speak for itself.

This extensive research through a typical Sicilian story of hushed up truths might have caused him some serious troubles from Brancaccio’s power that be. This is why the whole story revolves around him being missing and leaving the movie unfinished.

The story is told by Tatti Sanguineti, film critic and big friend of Maresco’s, who here investigates on his disappearance, explaining the events and commenting on what remains of the incomplete work.

The journey starts from the outskirts of Palermo: Brancaccio is still strongly imbued with traditional folklore. Festivals take place in the streets and neomelodical singers bow in the presence of Mafia bosses living there.

Belluscone - una storia siciliana Franco Maresco, ITALY - Orizzonti Venice goes yellow as a mystery engulfs the Serenissima: Franco Maresco, satirical director from Sicily, has suddenly disappeared and apparently no one knows where he is. Interviews were never confirmed, the press conference was cancelled at the eleventh hour, and, what is worse, he left his movie, Belluscone – Una storia siciliana apparently unfinished. The title itself suggests that the director, known to the Italian public for CinicoTV, a satirical TV program aired in the 90s, has touched too many raw nerves to come out in the sunlight, as if nothing happened.

Maresco’s purpose was to shoot a documentary that explained how come Silvio Berlusconi was so deeply attached to Palermo and its suburb, Brancaccio, where he always gains a multitude of votes at every election. Here he is perceived as a mythological figure, even capable of miracles, but yet, there is something wrong around this blind, unconditioned love and usually, in Sicily, exaggeration goes hand in hand with the mafia.

In tracing the origin of the relationship between the so-called Knight of Labor and the Island, Maresco goes back in time to explain the rise of Berlusconi’s political empire and how it is linked to mafia men and bosses. In doing so, he creates a harsh but still tragicomic x-ray of Italy, so far known. His analysis does raise a large amount of doubts and questions on the longstanding issue regarding the negotiation between Nation and Mafia. Although Sicilians unwittingly nod at it with silence and denial, the whole editing, built up on a

But who exactly are neomelodicals and what they have to do with Mafia and Berlusconi? They are an undefined group of Neapolitan singers whose lyrics deal with low popular culture issues. One of their songs, that ironically became the soundtrack of the movie, is a tribute to Berlusconi. Moreover, during their performances, the singers are asked – or rather forced - to bring a kind greeting to their dear inmates.

A song becomes the starting point for the director to a deeper research. Every piece of information is ultimately put together to draw an audiovisual jigsaw puzzle, reassembled piece by piece in front of the viewer’s eyes. The hardest part, if not the most dangerous one, must have been involving the bigwigs in this process: repentant mafia men, famous politicians and journalists: People who know but are not always that willing to stand up for it. Their involvement seems to be enough to raise a fuss and discourage Maresco from finishing the movie.

Yet, is an end really necessary? Maresco asks the audience a rhetorical question. But the answer, if needed to solve the enigma, is quite clear, as it flashes out of every spoken word and footage. In rebuilding a piece of contemporary Italian history, Franco Maresco gives not only a true example of the brilliant Sicilian humour, but also a huge stock of food for thought. It makes it an absolute mustsee, if you are eager to know more about two of the most trending Italian topics.

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by Marta Tudisco (Italy)

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review

of love letters to Clara while he reads excerpts in a desperate and soft almost musical tone. However, and unfortunately, this arc is left rather underdeveloped, a circumstance that could be attributed to Logan as a rookie mistake.

Manglehorn David Gordon Green, USA - Venezia 71 David Gordon Green is becoming a habitué of the Mostra. Indeed, after last year’s Joe, he is now back to the Venice Film Festival with yet another film in Competition: Manglehorn, starring Al Pacino, Holly Hunter and Chris Messina.

A.J. Manglehorn (Al Pacino) is a locksmith in a small town in Texas, anchored in a past he deeply regrets and cannot seem to let go. Living with his Persian cat Fannie, he goes about his existence doing routinely his job, going to the bank every Friday, occasionally seeing his slightly estranged son Jacob (Chris Messina) and granddaughter (Skyler Gasper) and writing desperate apologetic letters to his long lost love, Clara. He even attempts to slip into a relationship with his bank clerk, Dawn (Holly Hunter); an attempt he so blatantly and clumsily sabotages himself.

David Gordon Green is famous for his eclectic directorial choices.

After his last two excellent films, Manglehorn seems like a miscast indie done with an insecure and unevenfirst feature script by newcomer Paul Logan. The film opens very strongly indeed with an interesting introduction to the protagonist and his story. And, this part is perhaps the film’s strongest and most touching feature: his writing

Along the same lines, a similar comment can be made on Manglehorn’s relationship with Dawn. This would have been a very interesting and contrasting premise to explore and would help set some perspective on Manglehorn’s life, at different levels. The character of Dawn would be an essential element in achieving that. After all, the film is about questioning the past, leaving it behind and eventually moving on. In contrast, other than providing us the information that in his past the locksmith was a baseball coach, a character that proves to be utterly useless, yet ironically the most interesting one, is that of Gary (Harmony Korine). In that regard, the sequence at the beauty salon could have been left out.

But, then again, it was an excuse to provide Korine with more screen time. The subplot involving Manglehorn’s strained relationship with his disaffected son, apart from being poorly elaborated and bringing very little to the table is as cliché as it gets. The same can be said of the presence of a mime artist at the end of the film, although this one is a moving – and welcome – trope.

Al Pacino’s acting is unquestionably Manglehorn’s best feature, the most transfixing one, capable of making us forget the film’s many flaws.

Holly Hunter and Chris Messina both deliver uniformly rounded and precise performances who are, sadly, not enough to lift a film that very quickly falls flat and stays thus throughout. Not even David Gordon Green’s mastery can do much either. Tim Orr, Gordon Green’s regular collaborator, manages to sharply capture Al Pacino’s nuanced and exceptional acting through a variant lensing while the music by Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo – Gordon Green’s other regular collaborators – evocatively transmit Manglehorn’s nostalgia and longing.

The American filmmaker’s latest directing effort doesn’t, regrettably, work as well as it might have been expected. It cannot however be denied that Manglehorn is a poignant film in spite of its shortcomings.

The interest of both Al Pacino and Gordon Green’s fans will undoubtedly be sparked but it is not everybody’s cup of tea.

by Tara Karajica

a dychotomical drama on the internal journey of a man who suddenly overturns his life as he decides to stand out and make the right choice by saving an escort he falls for, Tanya (Greta Scarano), from being raped at his cousin’s whim.

Alhaique takes us to a trip along Rome’s gangland suburbs ruled by small clans, following the redemption of a man who takes the chance to turn his back to the ruthless values cultivated by his family and finally embrace the benevolent nature hidden behind a majestic height (Favino had actually had to put on some weight in order to identify with the sense of constraint owing to his condition).

Senza nessuna pietà Michele Alhaique, ITALY - Orizzonti You want it? You take it. You have it? You use it. Don’t you care about right or wrong, it doesn’t matter when it comes to power. That’s what Manuel Santili was taught, but not Mimmo, his cousin, raised in a family where the concept of good and evil, right or wrong dance in the balance of a knife blade. In this universe, violence – or its threat - is the only possible way to keep a balance and settle the scores.

Mimmo (Pierfrancesco Favino) works as a bricklayer and a henchman for his uncle, who runs a construction company and, in his spare time, plays at the loan shark surrounded by lackeys. Despite his majestic stature, Mimmo feels overwhelmed by a contrived sense of gratitude towards his uncle, who took him into custody after his father’s death.

His height is huge and a has a gloomy, scary look. But his eyes and attitudes suggest something completely different: he is a good man, a suburban hero whose strenght is about to set him free from the chains that kept him nailed to his family.

This might be a fresh start for Michele Alhaique’s first feature film, but he knows how to put some drama in a noir kept up by the stature of an amazing actor: Pierfrancesco Favino. Senza nessuna pietà is somehow

Yet, even if the setting and the plot is that of a noir movie, it predictably turns into love story between two fragile and lonely people stuck in a sort of endlessly manhunt in search of a safe place. The chocking atmosphere is built up by the closed, oppressive and suffocating urban spaces, portrayed like psychedelic labyrinths of concrete where the characters risk to stifle. The hardness of buildings is sweetened by the sounds and the sights of the sea, that on the contrary suggest abandonment, freedom, relief and the deep breath of life.

The use of handy-camera and the frequent close-ups silently capture the most subtle nuances of Mimmo and Tanya’s turmoils and you can almost read their thoughts. Communication is therefore exclusively based upon body gestures: the dialogues are essential and effective, reduced to a minimum. Silence seals a pact of trust and loyalty between the two lovers, and in any case it tunefully blends with the performances of the actors, who drag the viewer into a genuine and spontaneous participation. Music goes along with the story and supplies to the lack of dialogues, becoming the wire that links every scene to another, as if coming from Mimmo’s beating heart.

Directing, photography, music, and performances reveal that Alhaique is considerably confident about his technical choices and they eventually end up being functional and remarkable. Although it might be said that the major sore point is a weak and predictable plot, it is clear that Alhaique is still looking for his own visual language and the movie itself is to be considered a starting point for this reaserch. Nonetheless, despite being a first feature, it suggests that we should keep our eyes open on a young filmmaker at the dawn of his career.

by Marta Tudisco (Italy)

Š Francesca Merlo

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Interview with Director and Actor of Senza Nessuna PietĂ - Italy, Orizzonti

Michele Alhaique

&

Pierfrancesco Favino 6

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INTERVIEW

Senza nessuna pietà, one of the Italian films in competition for the Orizzonti award at this year´s Venice Film Festival, is the story of a man´s struggle to avoid following his family tradition in the dark inner circles of Rome´s organized crime. All the buzz surrounding the presence of the film here in Lido led us to met up with director Michele Alhaique and Italian superstar actor Pierfrancesco Favino, to find out about the process of making such a film.

You have a long experience in short films, how was the move into feature filmmaking?

Michele Alhaique: It was an organic transition. After several shorts I felt that this form was not enough for me anymore, I needed a narrative structure that could bring the story on a long distance. The first feature film is obviously very difficult; it took me years to set it up, to figure out what I wanted to tell.

Compared to a short, controlling the mis-en-scene and the storyline is a hundred times more complicated. The hardest part was editing: you have to see hours and hours of shots, you need to be clear headed to find a good balance and finish the job.

The use of the handy-camera somehow reduces the dialogues, since it leaves room for gestures and physicality. Is it a deliberate choice?

© Francesca Merlo

Michele Alhaique: It is my way of telling stories. I am clearly looking to figure out what my language is. I feel that the opportunity to follow the actors in their movements on the scene allows them to give their best, without any restrictions nor constraints. I think that the actors are at the same time authors: being inside the character, their actions contribute in composing the storyline. The handy-camera gives me the chance to catch the subtle nuances of the emotions that the character is experiencing on the scene, so I tried to go beyond the script lines and go down into the story.

Senza nessuna pietà takes you back to Italy after a long time in Hollywood. What have you brought to and from America?

Pierfrancesco Favino: After four come-outs I decided to take a break, because it seemed respectful towards me and towards the public. I was always there with a finger in every pie. I felt the need to stop. I think that an actor should stop and ask himself where he got creatively until that moment, what he gave and what he didn’t. You have to detach yourself from your job and look at it objectively. Then Rush and World War Z came out of the blue and gave me the opportunity to work in a different kind of cinema. Yet, passion and professionalism on the set are unchanged, but this is about my personal relationship with my job, fortunately still passionate and refined. In America, probably the most widespread tendency is to consider acting as a profession, not just the result of talent but also of technique. And that’s exactly what I’m doing: sharpening my skills.

This is also why I decided to produce Senza nessuna pietà, a movie that offered a good result from a creative point of view.

As a producer, it is obvious that you believe in young cinema.

How do you perceive it today?

Pierfrancesco Favino: Making a debut is becoming more and more difficult. This implies that the energies to launch a filmmaker must of course be put together even by people who are part of the world of cinema. This is not only about economics, but about commitment in general. I notice a general desire to roll up our sleeves, to take responsibility for the fate of cinema and to me this is a noble action.

In Senza nessuna pietà you had to put on twenty pounds, therefore your participation has been very “physical”. What was it like to shape your body to accommodate the character of Mimmo?

Pierfrancesco Favino: Shape is a beautiful word, because that’s what you try to do whenever you identify with your character: you try to re-form and deform your body, your thinking, your actions, to the benefit of the character you have to play.

In this case, the physical transformation was not only a virtuosity; it was a necessary step in order that I could understand how this man saw the world and how the world looked at him.

by Marta Tudisco (Italy)

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