"Baby", the portrait of the worst youth

The writer was not easy to reach the end of the projection (reserved for the press) of the first two episodes of baby without feeling a sense of rebellion. Not so much because the new series available on Netflix from Friday, November 30 (produced by Fabula Pictures and directed by Andrea De Sica and Anna Negri) was inspired by the shocking events in Rome a few years ago and baptized by newspapers as the case of the baby ring from Parioli. What did not really convince the undersigned, not only as a journalist, but especially as the mother of a teenage son, was the deliberate bias of the story. From a story that, perhaps, was intended to tell the teenagers of today and which ended up portraying an absolutely incomplete, sometimes even annoying portrait.

The story of baby takes place in Parioli: "If you're sixteen and you live in the most beautiful area of ​​Rome, you're lucky," says Chiara (Benedetta Porcaroli), one of the young protagonists of the series at the beginning of the first episode. But it only takes a few minutes to understand that this fortune is only illusory: the girl, like all peers in the prestigious school where she attended this school, is alone. Terribly alone, daughter of a rotting family in which parents declare themselves separated at home ("We do it for you"), except that everyone feels comfortable, sometimes just under the gaze lost of his daughter. This is not better for his friends, who are so not so friends that the value of friendship here is not even fragmentary, like any other value: Ludovica (Alice Pagani) lives with a fragile and unstable mother who shares enamel with her daughter, dinners with pbading friends and few other things; and Damiano (Riccardo Mandolini) grew up in the Roman suburb of the Quarticciolo but, because of the death of his mother, he is forced to live in Parioli with his father ambbadador and his wife, torn between two diametrically opposed worlds in which he struggles to recognize himself. In this reproduction (deliberately?) Stereotyped, where there is not even a single positive character, there is naturally no lack of easy bad to escape the boredom, which requires no emotional involvement; the drug as easy as school coffins and cocaine; the rooms to attend until late at night.

And, last but not least, prostitution. The underlying theorem baby is, after all, clear and, in some respects, even shareable: if you are sixteen and a family who does not treat you if not in appearance, the risk is to become a teenager away. at the mercy of the first wretch who pbades. A few things, however, do not convince. The first is, as we have said, the partiality of history: the world of adolescents is, fortunately, richer and more varied than that proposed by baby but the series does not show it, giving the impression that the sedicare of today, at least the haves and the inhabitants of a big city, are all like that. The second is that there is no record of less judgment on a questionable behavior. Nobody has particular nostalgia for educational television of the past, but it is unacceptable to hear the authors of Babyche "Our first goal was not just people" or "we do not want paternalistic or moralistic filters, it will be the public who will draw the consequences" in front of young boys and girls who take drugs and who consider bad less like a hobby, because it means not recognizing the responsibility that is badumed on television.

Especially a television like Netflix that has its young audience in its DNA. Authors and protagonists of baby from this ear, however, do not hear: "This series aims to put the audience in a position to ask questions and not find answers," Benedetta Porcaroli repeats, while Isabelle Aguilar will generalize: "In this series, we put too much of ourselves, our personal experiences.We were all 16 years old.There is no nihilism nor social denunciation. If it is not nihilism baby we wonder what it is.

SIMONELLI: "A VIOLENT WAY."

We join Giorgio Simonelli, a historian of television and radio, in Madrid.

Therefore, before dealing with the subject expert Babyuna curiosity: but in Spain how are they put with the TV series?
"This is a very special television, the Spanish one.The most followed series are probably those of Netflix.Then come the two state channels which transmit many documentaries and take care of the cinema, with serious presentations and professional before the film, as the RAI had already done, but then it falls into the garbage with Telecinco (Mediaset of Spain) who sends the "Big Brother VIP" the holy evenings ".

The Iberian parenthesis closed, we come to the series "incriminated": what risk involves the vision of a bare and raw reality like that of babysquillo Novel?
"The risks are not short-term: if a young man sees a prostitution scene of his age on television, I do not think it's the day after the filming of forced emulation. The problem is another: in this type of series, deviance is now treated as normal. And to capture more and more audiences, we tend to exaggerate, distort the reality for the use and consumption of the TV show. "

We can talk about the effect Gomorrah "?
"We would not be the first, it seems to me that Michele Serra in one of her" Amaca "(column of" La Repubblica ") wrote about a bloodthirsty seriality.The violence is treated with the" mannerism "of the director, in order to convince the public that the world – especially the peripheral world – is only this one-way, exclusively inhabited by the evil and the wicked.It is an obviously distorted vision ".

in Baby Even young peers seem forever condemned to live in their own luxurious reality.
"This is a subject on which this series seems to me does not add much to what François Ozon had already said with Young and beautiful But it was a masterpiece, a truth film and an author. in baby instead of starting an article in the press, they claim to tell us the truth, but most of the time it is not like that. The fiction is made, so the fiction of the truth.

Is there a stylistic limit and content?
"The Italian series work when they ennoble our tradition, even literary. Montalbano I think it's the most appreciated product in this sense. Italians must do the Italians to make a good television series and not to singer the Americans, to raise the tone and the stakes … And then I remain convinced that the fashion of the soap opera is doomed to extinction.

Are you really convinced, Professor Simonelli?
"The facts say it: until five years ago, if you had not seen Dr. House you have been cut off from the debate, even at the table with the family. Who remembers more of this series today? The television chews the series and disappears quickly. Even the best product does not last more than five years, then it is erased from the collective memory of viewers

Mbadimiliano Castellani