Written by Celluloid Liberation Front
Thursday, 29 April 2010 00:00
The cinematographic firmament of the English capital this month seems to be lit by the orrery of Italian cinema; the official monthly publication of the BFI has dedicated its cover and issue to the current state of the boot-shaped peninsula and a succinct season of Italian films is also running at the Riverside Studios.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has hosted the national premiere of Gabriele Salvatores latest effort, Happy Family, a sort of meta-cinematic comedy very much centred around its own world of routed gags, talented actors (Abatantuono, Bui and Bentivoglio in particular) and hagiographies of the belpaese. The Italian director has navigated his crafty command of cinema through many of its genres, and the comedy test finds him fairly attuned deploying his agreeable filmmaking techniques to crowd-pleasing extents. Nonetheless Happy Family represents a sharp turn from his previous work, As God Commands, the (adapted from a novel by Nicolò Ammaniti) crude story of a passionately desperate relation between a neo-fascist unemployed father and his timid and restless son. Set in a leaden Italian northeast where the public sphere is claustrophobically reduced to shopping malls, quarries and speculative architectures, the film conjured up a palpable sense of hostility and desolation very much like the tragic reality we refuse to see. Precarious existences, demented people obsessed with God and porn actresses, social dynamics of a ghastly and violent kind lucidly framed the plummeting state of Italian society with Salvatores boasting a sharp eye willing to avoid moral illusions and consolations. In Happy Family on the contrary the sociological removal is drastic and yet the audience is clearly not having any edulcorating abstraction, in this regard the opening sequence is rather eloquent: talking to the camera the animating character dedicates his film to the fearful inhabitants of these times.
The film, based on a theatre piece by Alessandro Genovesi, owes its structure, and its characters, to Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author: the debt is obvious since the actors appear in a dark room speaking to the camera and later ask for explanations to the author about their story being suddenly interrupted, up to the overt quotation when one of the character, the father, call the author “Pirandello.” However, and here is when Salvatores completely missed the point and betrayed Pirandello original tragicomedy, there is an astonishing lack of satire and social critique. If in Pirandello’s piece theatricalism (breaking the wall between the actors and the audience) was a subversive device to deconstruct the illusory stances of representation and its narcotic influence towards the audience, in Salvatores the outcomes are different if not antithetic. By means of addressing directly to the spectators, the film bends the spectator towards emphatic identification with the fictional characters and, given the absolving tone employed by the director towards the characters of his film, the social acquittal is therefore extended by the director to the whole cinema theatre.
The chosen topic is after all a declaration of intents on its own terms, the family constitutes a durable and corrupted institution within Italian society and the middle class, here framed through a benevolent and shallow gaze, is nursing terrorized its own decline. For a society clearing vulgarity as its own way of life, pained by the livid and rancorous asociality of celebrity culture – in Italy the minister for Equal Opportunities is a former calendar girl - such bonhomie is not the best antidote. In fact the film’s narrative is informed by reiterated outgrowths of Italianess, benign (up to which point?) commonplaces, piloted reactions all caught up in a perfectly oiled machine of stylized complacency. The films obviously regales the spectator with witty characterizations, well crafted lines and convincing performances but as much as his previous film exuded filmic poignancy Happy Family feels like a stale family reunion, irremediably out of place and time. The Milan Salvatores depicts is a faded postcard trapped in a nostalgic idealization, the typical algidity of that city – to which the director himself referred during the Q&A – is obliquely explored in an almost caricatural manner that gratifies rather than enticing. In a long sequence shot in black and white, the camera pans through every corner of the city to show its presumptive hidden life. Rather than a late homage to the magical realism of Cesare Zavattini, this sequence seems to be a self-referential elegy: once more, the charitable caress of the reconciliation spirit embraces the whole film. Due to this unresolved direction the film cannot exacts its viewing place and fluctuates aimlessly through a nowhere experience where too many are the embarrassing moments to be forgotten and the pultaceous aftertaste lingers on once the credits have rolled away.
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Saturday 04 February 2012
