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"A season of consternation in which it seems to me that I dominate contempt above all else, dominated by an arrogant, living and resentful atmosphere": Paolo Virzì sees Italy today. in comparison to the Belpaese of 28 years ago, its "Magic Nights", closing event of the Rome Film Festival, to be released on November 8. At the press conference, he did not hide his regret for Rome where he had landed in 1985 as a student of the Experimental Center: "Chaotic, black, even dirty and corrupt, but that brought joy: wonderful , for me, as the Parisian of the Lucien 800's "Lost Illusions".
"Magic Nights" is for Virzì "the myth of Italian cinema seen by those who loved it, but who also learned from the" Great "to tease it". That's why "we took the impertinent freedom to overthrow and demystify mythology, also showing despair, vulgarity, the feeling of finding ourselves in a hellish circle, all we loved as crazy and fed our exalted stories ".
Paolo Virzi did with "Notti magiche" (the song of the same name Nannini-Bennato was the acronym for the 1990 World Cup) a reckless comedy. Imprudent because it has as protagonist nothing less than the mythological world of Italian cinema in its last glorious season, reminiscent of the "comical astonishment" of aspiring scriptwriters who landed there for the first time. A fresco "from the inside" on the type of one who was dared by Robert Altman in "The Player" ("The protagonists", as if by chance, 1992), but with the rearview mirror of the time .
The Rome of cinema in which Virzì landed at that time was still animated by the "great old men" of the glorious generation, the Monicelli, Scola, Antonioni, Fellini, Montaldo. ..The writers called Age and Scarpelli, Piero De Bernardi, Leon Benvenuti, Ennio De Concini .. In this male and male Gotha, the only two women, Wertmuller and Cavani, pbaded by "authors in pants".
It is a parterre that is scary, and in "Amarcord" ex-boy, Livorno appears as all-city with the only name of baptism, according to the custom of then – but in the background, a little like the "shepherds of the distance" of Neapolitan Crib.
On the other hand, there are equally recognizable characters, to whom the director has changed the biographical and character characteristics: there is the legendary lawyer, Giovanna Cau, a frenetic and periodically distraught producer, such as Leandro Saponara (Giancarlo Giannini) evokes Cecchi Gori, there is a Fulvio Zappellini (Roberto Herlitzka) who alludes to Virzì's "writer father", Furio Scarpelli. "But if I wanted to paint it faithfully, I would have made it softer and sweeter, I added lashes from Amidei," says the director.
I felt the need to compare face to face with Virzì because the part of the autobiographical indices of this work far exceeds that present in "La bella vita", in "Ovosodo" and in "La prima cosa bella". There is a funny melancholy in the memory of what he calls "the last flashes of a cultural, cinematic and political twilight". And there is the effort to send them back wide open but wildly amused by the novices, like him then Francesca Archibugi and Francesco Piccolo, co-authors of the film.
The police investigation involving three young prospects, finalists of the Solinas Prize for new screenwriters, is the narrative pretext of this dive into the memory. While the Italian football is nailed to the television screens and the national team was eliminated on penalties by Argentina, the car of a famous producer crashes against the Tiber. And on the corpse is a Polaroid that festively represents with him. Guilty?
Paradoxically, it is precisely to an officer of the carabineros that the film entrusts the first precept of Scarpelliano, but also of zavattiniano, the creative rule: "It is always necessary to look out the window". Because "Magic Nights" is also a reflection on the art of telling, about what it means to observe life without blinkers and turn it into a movie.
For those who are not saved from the registration desk – and the period of attendance – many details will escape. There is the Osteria "Da Otello", theater of gossip, cigarettes, pbadionate arguments, "insults that seemed bloody and were rather playful". There is the "writing" factory of Scarpelli, via Bertoloni, with the favorite "disciple" painting (Archibugi?), But in reconstruction, it is "bigger than life". There is the real episode of the letter with which dockers from Livorno recommended to companion Montaldo the "valiant" Virzì boy. There is the militant filmmaker arrested for years (Andrea Roncato), in which the Resistance of Anac converge and perhaps "Valentino Orsini for the commitment, Tonino De Bernardi for Hunger". There is the Fellinian game of "The Voice of the Moon" and there is the Power, Craxi, De Michelis.
This is not a late clone of "La terrazza" di Scola, "Magic Nights", but rather the dream that Virzì has cultivated for years, thinking of Balzac's "Lost Illusions": "At the He was astonished and disenchanted – he said – of which "years come from the province in the world that until then had only dreamed". In the eyes of today, this Rome, this cinema and this Italy disappeared, with their "splendor and their misery" (Balzac still), have a perfume of jurbadic park.
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