I was so hoping to be blown away by an Italian film taking me to places I've never been or, at least, to places I've been before but through new unexplored roads. I'll have to keep hoping and waiting. Nothing new in the Italian cinematographic landscape. Very depressing really and that's without mentioning the platitudes surrounding every Italian outing at this 64th/75th anniversary of the Venice Film Fest. Here the subject is "mafia" are we surprised? Luigi Lo Cascio plays one of them, growing convinced that he's a good guy really. Then, of course, he starts to notice. Oh please! Lo Cascio is a very good actor but his earnestness leaves me cold. Bad thing in a movie in which you're desperate to feel something other than the calculated humor and the humorless treatment of this exhausted subject matter. What's wrong with us? If we were an Industry (I use the word without really meaning to) without a past, I could understand this attempts to tell ourselves through our movies. But all that was accomplished in the 40's, 50's, 60s when everything seemed impossible. Look at Francesco Rosi's work or Elio Petri's - I'm not even going to mention Rossellini, for everybody's sake. This are not ridiculous comparisons. They were not aliens from another planet, they were Italians who grew among the same contradictions that we face now. We certainly have more money and a wider horizon, then, why the poverty of ideas? If you want to revisit the mafia, revisit the mafia, but in a way that may help us to see it from a different angle, with a different optical. Okay, forgive the rant. It was just an angry, nervous reflection.
Review of Il dolce e l'amaro
