🎥 A Trilogy: Life’s Labyrinths, Part II

1. Nyhterinos ekfonitis | Athens Midnight Radio (2024) Greece, Directed by Renos Haralambidis
2. La grazia (2025) Italy, Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
3. Il tempo che ci vuole|The Time it Takes (2024) Italy | France, Directed by Francesca Comencini

Italian Film Festival + Greek Film Festival 2025

^{At a crossroads – Toni Servillo as the fictional president of Italy about to finish his final term in office…}

La grazia

Paolo Sorrentino’s La grazia was the second film I saw at this year’s Italian Film Festival. It was also the only film that was advertised on the site without a trailer (some weird AI-generated trailer was available upon searching on YouTube – but you could smell its fishy falsity within a couple of seconds) and the singular marketing I managed to find at the time, was an image of the back of the great Toni Servillo (Sorrentino’s chameleonic long-term collaborator), dressed formally in a black coat and hat, standing looking sideways on what looks to be a country road that leads somewhere into the distance. His gaze unseen by us, his face, in a half profile, yielded little expression, at least none that can be easily deciphered. Even the 20 word blurb gave nothing away. I entered the theatre with only a hastily glanced meaning of the words la grazia in mind.

La grazia is a word that describes not only the translation any English-speaking person would discern upon seeing the word – grace. Its variation in usage and meaning yields a complex but well-rounded description of Sorrentino’s elegant film (note he was also the writer of this film). The word signals multiple meanings concurrently: 1. Favour or benevolence in the form of goodwill; 2. Gratitude – in its signifying of thankfulness or a blessing; 3. Also, it conveys the idea of pardon or mercy in a legal sense, of clemency or formal pardon granted by the head of state; and lastly, 4. The spiritual beneficence of divine favour – where a state of grace is attained.

^{Servillo’s Mariano with his daughter, Dorotea (Ana Ferzetti)}

Just like a modern-day sorcerer, Sorrentino weaves these elements together into the life-taspestry of Servillo’s Italian President, Mariano de Santis, who is serving out the last 6 months of his 7 year term. His daughter, Dorotea (Ana Ferzetti) runs a tight schedule for him, right down to what he is allowed to eat, (something like boiled fish and potatoes), so as to keep his weight off; a somewhat sardonic recurring theme: the president’s envy of the weightlessness of an astronaut who also has 6 months before returning to earth, and the president’s own earnt nickname of ‘reinforced concrete’ – conjuring a visual image of a slab of that heavy but dull, grey material; but really, this description is in context to his dogmatism in carrying out duties to the letter of the law. 

And so, his days passed, not unkindly, like that of a groundhog, where one day blends into the next; where history weighs him down and the future is but an abyss, a void eternal in which he must surrender. Sometimes when he is up on the roof top of his residence, we couldn’t help but wonder whether he would leap off its parapet. 

^{A memory fragment}

In an echo of the eternal city where he lives, eternity is measured by the stretch of his inability to act on (seemingly) just three things: 1. To put his signature to an euthanesia bill that his daughter has prepared; 2. The decision of whether to grant pardon to a woman who has murdered her abusive husband; and 3. Whether or not to grant pardon to a man who had ended his wife’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. If we go back to the marketing still for this film, we now know that, despite the straight road that leads ahead, de Santis had turned his head to the side, and in doing so, he is offering up to himself, a different choice, a diverting path to take (somewhere off-frame). And this is how he has to navigate what remains of his term and what remains of his life – the loss of his wife, his knowledge that she has cheated on him at a much earlier juncture of their marriage, and the three things of his governance weighed on him (no amount of dieting would alleviate his heavy burden).

^{Milvia Marigliano is brilliant as Coco (to the left of Servillo)}

But there are light-hearted moments too: in the form of his larger than life friend, Coco Valori, played here with unforgettable flair and vibrancy by Milvia Marigliano delivers to the camera a rich Fellinesque jewel that Sorrentino reveres. Other moments of hilarity come in the form of Chaplinesque caper: the red-carpeted arrival of the Portuguese prime minister, majestically broken by a sudden rain storm – all in exquisite multi-angled slow motion for our visual enjoyment – a mockery of the absurdity of formalities. Working with his long-term collaborator, Daria D’Antonio, at the helm of the camera, providing just the right amount of comedy to offset the gravity of Mariano’s decisions. We mustn’t forget to mention de Santis’ new penchant for listening to rap music in the evenings on his headphones, seated in the official cabinet’s leather and dark wood office – just when you think any seriousness was checked at the door – Sorrentino raps, to camera, perfectly. In fact, the pulsing techno music that recurs throughout the film acts as that needlepoint of balance on a scale – tipping sometimes to enjoyment, sometimes to endurance; a metaphor for one’s moral compass: the unyielding oscillation between doubt and certainty, right or wrong.

In Sorrentino’s 2024 Parthenope, a film I regard as the writer/director’s best work (sadly my sentiment was not shared by critics), he posed this question: “what happens if you just let go?” – a profound and deeply troubling question, as most people desperately cling onto whatever they deem to be important, when really, nothing is as vital as it may seem – good looks, what other people think of you, the millstone around your neck (unless you’re one of the handful of fortunates who love your job), politics and government, social media, or things you simply can’t change. Who dares to live authentically as themselves these days (despite loud pronouncements of this achievement)? And here in La grazia, the question asked is a simpler one, but no less weighty: “who owns our days?”, a follow-up question of the former. If there is a right answer to this question, does it make it true to your current situation? For me, the dual questions posed by Sorrentino continue to linger long after the film ends. 

^{The ‘saintly’ de Santis sneaking a cigarette}

La grazia won 7 awards at the 82nd Venice Film Festival with Servillo taking the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. 

^{A solemn but emotive scene where Mariano joins in on an Alpini Mountain Infantry song with the troops}

An interesting interview with the director at the 63rd New York Film Festival is available here.

^{Friends and collaborators… Servillo and Sorrentino: brilliant artists}

The Italian Film Festival ran in September and October in Australia this year.

The Greek Film Festival ran in October in Australia this year.

Look back on the first instalment, on Athens Midnight Radio by director Renos Haralambidis

Look out for the next and final instalment, on The Time it Takes by director Francesca Comencini.

^{Francesca Comencini (right) directing Romana Maggiora Vergano in The Time it Takes}

 

🎥Filmic Postcard: Italian Film Festival 2022 – (Part 1) 3/19 and Lord of the Ants

3/19 (2020) Italy

Directed by Silvio Soldini

Il signore delle formiche | Lord of the Ants (2022) Italy

Directed by Gianni Amelio

Don’t Leave Me – slow-burn Italian crime drama set in Venice, with Vittoria Puccini as Detective Chief Inspector Elena Zonin (from the makers of ZeroZeroZero and Gomorrah)

My year of Italian Renaissance circa 2021 has followed me into this 2022 year of vertiginous winters, with wet duplicitous spiralling days filled with worsening world news and my own (forced) professional reboot. I found solace in consuming serial TV programs at the end of each long day: Faster Than Fear, Crisis Unit, In Therapy, Irma Vep, Astrid, Don’t Leave Me, The Split, My Brilliant Friend (season 3), L’Ora, The Silence of Water, Doc, Inspector Ricciardi amongst others. Most of what I watched were German, French, British or Italian productions. Throughout the past nine months, whatever preconceptions I’ve had about Italian sentimentality were soon washed over by an almost magical discovery of something fragile and intelligent in their stories. In fact, the discovery is of something more enigmatic – akin to one’s soul – or at least, in a more recognisable form, it speaks to an open encounter with kindness (and forgive me for quoting Keanu Reeves here : “I would not want to be a part of a world where being kind is a weakness”) that becomes the fuel behind many of their stories, of personal relationships and social responsibilities. 

The first two films to be reviewed for this year’s St Ali’s Italian Film Festival, 3/19 and Lord of the Ants also have this glowing jewel, of love and humanity, or love of humanity at its core.

Kasia Smutniak is brilliant as Camilla, a high-flying corporate lawyer.

It’s not really possible to say that Camilla, played engrossingly by Kasia Smutniak (a well-known face in cinema of late, Perfect Strangers (2016), Made in Italy (2018) and Loro I and Loro II (2018)) is unhappy: she is a successful and calculating lawyer (feared and revered by her minions in equal measure) who has a rather meaningless if careless mother/daughter relationship with her university-aged daughter Adele (Caterina Forza), and the cream on top is that Camilla has settled into a semi routine, by way of a simpatico love nest with married man, all with the comforting knowledge that this relationship would ultimately lead nowhere.

The love nest soon to be flown.

Sometimes, it only takes a small crack for things to unravel, the beat of a butterfly’s wing, or in this case, a rainy night incident where Camilla was involved in a hit and run by a motorbike. Kids on a stolen bike or kids out for a ride and didn’t see her, either way, one of the kids died, a John Doe, he is 3/19, unknown and unidentified, the third person in this predicament in 2019. 

The film has a slaty palette, jarring bled-out greens and hues that matched the mood of an eternal and bloodless winter; cinematographer Matteo Cocco’s angular framing of Smutniak’s equally masculine jawline made her character even more austere and flinty – all perfectly camouflaged in the Milanese backdrop of stones and histories. But as Camilla unpicked her way through this tapestry of the unknown person, their histories and connections; we realise that the seduction that gets played out in this film is not of sex or desire, but is of kindness and consideration. We are consumed by its wilderness – whether it is the forest in Camilla’s mind’s eye, or the sea by which the young man is buried; and in this regard, Camilla needed to desperately revolt against her own sense of decorum and habitual justice to find beauty and meaning in something completely foreign to her. 

Francesco Colella (left) plays Bruno, a director at the mortuary, plays detective with Camilla.

Some may see that she is reborn, but I’d like to see that she’s just discovered something new within herself, perhaps something that was always there. In her nascent form, she is well matched by Bruno, the director of the mortuary. I see him as the guardian of the dead and the keeper of their secrets, the overseer of one’s last repose. Bruno is an everyman, played wonderfully by Francesco Colella, who also stars in one of my favourite recent TV series, L’Ora (currently showing on SBS) and the more gritty drama ZeroZeroZero (also on SBS). 

Mother and daughter moments.

What unfolds is a personal endeavour to travel through an unknown and invisible history of a stranger, brought closer through a found photo in the pocket of the young man, and a beautiful ancient poem written in Arabic. It is as though all these things are calling out her name and binding her to a future, the constitution of family, hers, with Adele, through a lost son.

Bracing for love, Luigi Lo Cascio plays the brilliant Aldo Braibanti in Lord of the Ants

Three loves, Ettore, Aldo and ants.

Lord of the Ants also calls forth the need to belong. A thread that binds Aldo Braibanti’s story is told in elliptically with much of his desire for a certain young man, Ettore Tagliaferri, (sensitively portrayed by first-timer, Leonardo Maltese) as a meeting of the minds and heart despite their physical attraction. And this is precisely an area this fictional portrayal of Braibanti’s life focuses on, the idea of plagio, translated as ‘plagiarism’. It is a mediaeval crime where one is accused of influencing another person’s mind to the extent of taking possession of it; and to imbue the other person with immoral actions and thoughts. The Italian criminal code defines it as “whoever submits a person to his own power, in order to reduce them to a state of subjection”, in order words, forcefully subjecting their will over another’s; meaning that Braibanti was to take full blame in whatever that happened between him and Ettore. 

Dramaturgy, poiesis and experimental theatre at work.

The backstory of how the two men met was brought to life nostalgically, full of poiesis and beauty. Luigi Lo Cascio, who also starred in last year’s film festival favourite Lacci or The Ties (2020), reviewed here; is perfectly cast as Braibanti: handsome, urbane, artistically and politically active, uncompromising and (without sounding condescending) the epitome of 60s Italian intelligentsia. It is no wonder that young men and women gravitated to his poetry, visual art and dramatic theatrical experiments that were held in a commune at the Farnese tower of Castell’Arquato. These experiments, as well as large scale studies of ant colonies lasted for six years before he moved to Rome. The production design by Marta Maffucci as well as some of the location shots is magnificent (some scenes were reminiscent of the freedom of French New Wave cinema), and there are some brilliant anti-theatre staged sets at the commune; but for me, it is the first scene, of the softly-spoken Aldo, in an open Roman movie theatre by the water with Ettore, reciting poetry to each other, that has this audience entranced from the very beginning, that, and the writing.

Ettore and his brother – freedom or fight

Most of the film is focused on the trial, and that in itself – a courtroom drama – is of historical importance; but it is through a myriad of side stories that allowed us a real glimpse into the Braibanti universe: the loving relationship between Braibanti and his mother, the relationship of Ennio (played by Elio Germano, most recently we’ve seen in him Lucia’s Grace (2018) and Rose Island (2020)) a journalist sent to cover the trial by his Communist newspaper and his cousin, his cousin’s lover, the student protestors, the ‘cure’ provided by the psychiatric centre on Ettore, and even Ettore’s own naivety, spoke volumes of the 60s in Rome. In the end, though, it is the story of Braibanti and Ettore that eclipses all else; and Cascio’s brilliant performance made their story so palpable and arresting to watch on the big screen. 

Elio Germano as the beat journalist Ennio, with his cousin

Ending this review on a side note: it’s interesting to note that director, Gianni Amelio came out as gay only a few years ago when he was in his sixties; so I would say that this is would be a very personal film that he’s made, and perhaps explains why this is a fictionalised account rather than a straight biopic – in order to allow for artistic freedom and poetry. It took out 4 awards at the Venice Film Festival this year. If you’re interested in the actual trial itself, Carmen Giardina and Massimiliano Palmese directed a documentary on Braibanti‘s trial in 2020 called Il caso Braibanti. The film was awarded the Nastro d’Argento prize, one of Italy’s most prestigious awards. But if you’re interested in a moral drama of the unmappable human heart, then, Amelio’s film soars above all else.

#italianfilmfestival is currently playing at selected Palace cinemas around Australia, finishing on the 16th October in Perth.
#filmfestivaleveryday #filmoftheday #jandnfilmfestival