Reality

REALITY           B-                

Italy  France  (115 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Matteo Garrone 

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.    

—Rain (Juliette Lewis) from Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992)

Without a doubt, this is a film with sensational camerawork throughout by Marco Onorato adding a degree of power and complexity missing from the rest of the film that often feels slight and overly superficial, where an extended opening aerial shot draws us into a surrealist fantasy aspect of the film, reminiscent of a Disney fairy tale wedding where the newlyweds arrive in a horse drawn carriage to festivities that appear right out of a Fellini film, where fat, old, and grotesquely ugly characters fit right in with the colorful artificiality of the moment, giving it a garish, carnivalesque atmosphere where the guests are ogling over a Reality TV star named Enzo (Rafaele Ferranti), whose appearance seems to inspire a special delight.  Flying in and out on a helicopter surrounded by a throng of photographers, one of the local Dads, Luciano (Ariello Arena), hoisting his young daughter on his arm, asks for a celebrity autograph, mesmerized by all the attention Enzo gathers and how easily this impresses his young daughter, making up his mind right then and there to become a contestant on the Realty TV show Big Brother.  While this may be a satirical attempt to expose the self destructive effects of reality television, it seems more interested in the superficialities of celebrity worship and the idea that something inside every one of us wants to be famous, worshipped, and adored by the public.  While this thought alone is a delusion, as just as many intentionally avoid the spotlight, this plays out more as an internalized fantasy playing out in one man’s mind, where an all-consuming, get-rich-quick fantasy takes over his actual life, becoming so obsessed with the desire to be on the TV program that this sudden rush of interest replaces his own ordinary life, much like Star Wars or Star Trek fanatics live vicariously through movie characters, literally inhabiting a fantasy world.  

Garrone wanted to use actor Ariello Arena as a hitman in his earlier neo realist crime drama GOMORRAH (2008), as he is actually sentenced to a life sentence without parole in Volterra prison for shooting three rival gangsters in 1991, but the prison parole board felt the part was too close to his actual crime.  He was allowed day passes to work on this film, however, delving into a self-imposed manic fantasia that may be easier to channel by spending large amounts of time locked up, isolated from the rest of society.  Arena plays Luciano as a typical ordinary guy with a special exuberance and child-like wonder, an everyman who lives for his family and friends, a popular man in the community where he works in the local street markets selling fish with his partner Michele (Nando Paone), but often socializes with others who work nearby, including Ciro Petrone, a young coffee server who played one of the teenage gangsters in GOMORRAH.  Together with his wife Maria (Loredana Simioli) they run a neighborhood scam on unsuspecting housewives selling them products they eventually reclaim.  Living in an old, dilapidated section of Naples with plenty of family nearby, he’s the object of continual affection with the older women constantly doting on him, always laughing at his bad jokes, where he often performs skits for family entertainment at birthday parties, becoming something of a familiar clown.  When Big Brother tryouts arrive in Naples, Luciano is interviewed, still toting his kids around with him wherever he goes, as if this TV program offers him some status of legitimacy that he wouldn’t otherwise have.  He’s even called for a second interview in Rome's Cinecittà Studios, becoming the talk of the town, where it’s only a matter of time before he becomes a contestant. 

Unlike the ultra realism of his earlier film, Garrone chooses to embellish this film with wild Italian stereotypes and exaggerated, over-the-top characters often seen yelling back and forth at each other, where there isn’t an ounce of subtlety here, as everything is expressed through a brightly colored world of artifice, where gestures and mannerisms are as prevalent as gossip and rumors.  When he learns that TV sends out observers, where anyone he sees could be a spy for the show, this immediately exacerbates his growing sense of paranoia, where every stranger’s face suddenly works for the station and is watching him, becoming a personal test.  He becomes so confident of his winning personality, however, that he even sells his fish stand, making way for his all but inevitable appearance.  When the new season starts without him, though, he slowly disappears from public view, becoming isolated and anti-social, withdrawing from the neighborhood, spending every waking hour watching the show, wondering how to impress the judges and what test he must pass to be chosen, like modifying one’s behavior to get into Heaven.  When he starts giving away all their personal belongings in an absurdist Christian gesture of contributing to the poor, he grows further out of control and unreachable, so alienated from his wife that she goes to live with her mother.  While there is a strong sense of local community and neighborhood support that is ultimately rejected, the film is a study of delusion and broken dreams, where fantasy takes the place of reality.  There is at least the suggestion that television may be the new religion, what Karl Marx called “the opiate of the masses,” where it offers a soulless moral reflection of the vast emptiness of modern society.  Guided by unhealthy notions of consumerist popularity and commercial success, Reality TV exists almost without purpose, which is itself a kind of alternate reality, as who needs to watch the empty, unfocused lives of others?  This film makes no attempts to offer any cultural significance to the medium, delving instead into the psychological void that exists within.   

Dormant Beauty (Bella addormentata)

DORMANT BEAUTY (Bella addormentata)         C              

Italy  France  (115 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Marco Bellochio

A grim, depressingly downbeat, and emotionally unsatisfying effort from Bellocchio, who was so distraught that the film didn’t win any awards at the 2012 Venice Film Festival that he announced he would never bring another film to Venice, while Jury member and fellow Italian director Matteo Garrone vowed never to serve on a jury again for an Italian film festival.  This is nothing new, as in 2010 under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government, his Italian culture minister Sandro Bondi threatened to take over the festival because the judges (led by Quentin Tarantino) awarded no prizes to Italian films, claiming since the festival is financed by the state he should be able to hand-pick the jury, a move that was quickly rejected by the festival.  Ousted by the Berlusconi government in 2002, Alberto Barbera was reinstated as the Festival Director in 2012, where after all the headlines in the national press focusing on Italian films, it must have come as a big surprise to Italian filmmakers who felt they had stacked the deck in favor of their films.  It’s extremely disingenuous, however, to inflict nationalistic sentiments at an international film festival, where only 9 French films, by the way, have been awarded the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Festival since 1939, only once in the last 25 years, so that’s actually what makes it such an attractive and world prestigious event.  While Bellocchio has been nominated for the Venice Golden Lion three times to go along with six Palme D’Or nominations at Cannes, he’s been shut out from taking the top prize, though he was awarded a lifetime achievement award at Venice in 2011.  No Italian film has won the Golden Lion at Venice since 1988, which may not say a lot about Italian films, but it speaks volumes for the credibility of the festival itself.  Why prestigious Italian artists are intent on undermining Venice and turning it into a provincial festival makes no sense, so Bellocchio and Garrone, both well known and respected international directors, only look foolish, where they’re apparently buying into the outdated Berlusconi propaganda.  For what it’s worth, only one Italian film has been nominated as one of the five finalists in the Academy Award Best Foreign Film category since Roberto Benigni’s LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL in 1998, so Italian films have not exactly taken the world by storm in the past decade or so as they did in the 50’s and 60’s.   

Bellocchio’s last film VINCERE (2009), however, was one of his best, a gorgeously powerful historical drama documenting the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini as seen through the eyes of the mother of his firstborn son, born out of wedlock, so when Mussolini rose to power, both were secretly whisked away and sent to live in asylums throughout Mussolini’s regime, eventually dying in confinement.  The film certainly casts a shadow on the moral depravity of Italian leadership through World War II, where the parallel to Berlusconi’s own extensive record of moral hypocrisy and criminal conduct does not go unnoticed.  DORMANT BEAUTY attempts to examine another moral issue making headlines in the Italian press, namely what to do with coma patients that show no sign of brain activity, where the argument is whether they are actually dead, kept breathing by life support, or in a state of sleep where they might one day miraculously recover.  Much like the 2001 Terri Schiavo case in the United States, right-to-life religious groups, led by the Catholic Church, believed she was still alive, while her own husband wished to remove the life support system after 8-years in a coma but was prevented by government involvement, prolonging the case until exhausting all judicial avenues four years later.  Italy had a similar public debate over the Eluana Englaro case in 2009, where after 17-years in a coma from a car accident the father chose to remove his daughter from life support, but the Berlusconi government and the Catholic Church aligned themselves to prevent him from doing it, initiating legal challenges and going public on all the Berlusconi-owned Italian newspapers and extensive TV channels, including three national and several private stations, including RAI, which is one of the producers of the film, in an attempt to convince the public this is paramount to murder.  The effect was so extensive that the Friuli Venezia Giulia Film Commission in the Northeast province where this film was shot actually dissolved its own organization hoping to block financing for the film, but they are also listed as one of the production companies. 

Without offering any backstory, which in this case necessitates confusion or is playing strictly to an Italian audience, the film, co-written by the director, unfortunately assumes familiarity with the case, where after a decade of court decisions strictly prohibiting any action, in 2009 Eluana’s father is finally given the legal right to remove life support.  However, the nuns caring for Eluana since 1994 are seen on television making a public appeal to continue taking care of her, believing she is still alive despite her father’s contention that she was already dead, forcing the father to move her to a private nursing facility, which is where the film begins.  Despite the court decision, a right-wing crusade led by Berlusconi and the Vatican, along with a well-financed media campaign, promote the idea that Eluana’s father is murdering his daughter, the view of the Church, further inflamed by Berlusconi’s pronouncement that Eluana is not only alive but capable of bearing a child.  While public opinion suggests more than 80% of Italians support the father’s right, a defiantly outraged minority lead organized demonstrations and candlelight vigils in Eluana’s behalf while the government hastily draws legislation that would impose religious standards over the rights of individuals.  Bellocchio interweaves several different melodramatic stories, including a conscience-stricken politician, Toni Servillo as Uliano Beffardi, a first term senator elected from Berlusconi’s party, who already faced this dilemma with his own wife, and while he’s adamantly against the proposed legislation, he’s advised by his party to abstain or disappear, but his bigger fear is losing his religious-minded daughter in the process, Alba Rohrwacher as Maria, who joins the angry public demonstrations, meeting someone she likes on the opposite side of the police barricades, Roberto (Michele Riondini), constantly seen attempting to appease the disturbing actions of his violently angry, mentally ill brother.  The budding romance between the two quickly gets lost in the constantly shifting dynamic.  

In a similar side story that confusingly resembles that of Eluana, where many in the audience may not realize the distinction, Isabelle Huppert, known only as the Divine Mother (as she is called by her son), embodies the position of the church with her own coma-stricken daughter.  A famous actress who abruptly quit her career to assume full-time care of her daughter, alienating her husband and son in the process, she devotes her life to religious devotion, complete with an army of nurses and nuns who look after her in a palatial estate, she gathers her family together to celebrate her daughter’s birthday, where it’s impossible not to hear the constant sound of the life support apparatus doing the breathing for her.  Despite the constant drone, emotions fly fast and furious, especially the near hysterical rants from her spoiled and overly pampered son who seems to be having an absent mother crisis, while the regal countenance of Huppert displays an aristocratic control over her suppressed emotions through a kind of self-imposed noble rigidity, literally imposing her will over every aspect of her daughter’s immaculate care, though she can be heard muttering to herself the lines of Lady Macbeth, unable to get the stain or smell of blood off her hands.   And in yet another storyline, a young doctor (the director’s son, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio) gets sucked into the desperate acts of a suicidal drug addict (Maya Sansa) whose beauty betrays her noxious intentions.  While the rest of the hospital staff callously take bets on the hour of Eluana’s eventual death, he keeps a watchful vigil over his new patient’s hospital bed, inexplicably drawn to her fierce desire to end her life, telling her, “You’re free to kill yourself, and I’m free to try to stop you.”  Straining for dramatic cohesiveness and never developing any sense of emotional impact, the mood remains overly detached and downright gloomy throughout, though one has to chuckle at a somewhat surreal scene that comes out of nowhere, taking place in an ancient candle-lit bath house where Roman senators nakedly congregate before important votes, their heads seen floating on the surface of the water with their eyes glued to the television.  Roberto Herlitzka plays a medication dispensing psychiatrist prescribing uppers or downers to depressed politicians.  Bellocchio, however, fails to establish any connecting interest between the underdeveloped characters and storylines, especially with the director’s insistence to continually interrupt the proceedings with the disturbing actions of mentally unstable characters, where the suggestion of romantic possibilities, for instance, feels contrived and downright ludicrous, losing focus and interest in a convoluted structure that feels increasingly disconnected.  While the experience is frustratingly disappointing, what the film does have going for it (besides Huppert) is a superb soundtrack by Carlo Crivelli in an ultra dramatic, percussive-laden adaptation of Brian Eno and David Bowie David Bowie Abdulmajid (Ryko version) - YouTube  (3:30).   

Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy (Romanzo di una strage)

PIAZZA FONTANA:  THE ITALIAN CONSPIRACY (Romanzo di una strage)    B+  
Italy  France  (129 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Marco Tullio Giordana

Marco Tullio Giordana is the director best known for THE BEST OF YOUTH (2003), a 6-hour made-for-TV mini-series that screened to great acclaim at Cannes, following two brothers in an Italian family from the mid-60’s to the present, a film that contrasts the failed leftist political activism of the beginning with the faded apathy in the later years, a lead-in to the Berlusconi era.  Giordana was born in Milan, the second largest city in Italy with a strong working class reputation, where Fascist leader Benito Mussolini first organized his Blackshirts, used initially by the government in 1920 as strikebreakers to crush the rising socialist movement.  After trade unions were dissolved, Mussolini consolidated his Fascist movement throughout the nation, culminating with his March on Rome, where the Prime Minister declared a state of siege that Italian King Victor Emmanuel III refused to enforce, fearing a Civil War between the Army and the Fascists, handing over military power instead to Mussolini who went on to install a dictatorship in 1924 after Fascists kidnapped and murdered the socialist opposition candidate Giacomo Matteotti, who openly denounced Fascist election violence and vote fraud.  Three Fascist leaders were convicted of his murder, but released shortly afterwards, given amnesty by the King.  Only after the war was another trial convened and the three men given life sentences.  Mussolini proclaimed Fascism the “superb passion of the best youth of Italy,” and ruled until the end of World War II when Allied American troops marched into Milan.  But before they arrived, members of the resistance movement seized control of the city and executed Mussolini, his mistress, and three other Fascist leaders, hanging them by their feet in the Piazzale Loreto, a public square (from left to right, Nicola Bombacci, Benito Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, Alessandro Pavolini, and Achille Starace, seen here:  Mussolini_e_Petacci_a_Piazzale_Loreto,_1945.jpg).  The historical influence of Fascism in Milan is significant, giving rise to Giordana’s new film, an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the untold conspiracy behind the bombing of a downtown bank in 1969 that left 17 dead and more than 100 wounded.  

It’s impossible to see this film and not think of the Costa-Gavras film Z (1969), a somewhat fictionalized but extraordinarily dramatic account of the 1963 murder of a left-wing politician in Greece, Gregoris Lambrakis, orchestrated by the secret police at the behest of a right-wing military organization, an event that lead to a military coup d’état, where a week before a scheduled election the Prime Minister and all the left-wing politicians were arrested and held incommunicado by the conspirators, including mass arrests of ordinary citizens suspected of left-wing sympathies.  The takeover was led by a military junta known as the Regime of the Colonels who ruled Greece from 1967 – 1974, led by Colonel George Papadopoulos, one of the ringleaders, who, along with 19 other co-conspirators were eventually tried in 1975 for high treason and insurrection.  The Italian far right, however, was highly impressed by the methods of Papadopoulos and his military junta, where in 1968, 50 members were invited to view the junta’s methods firsthand, returning to Italy afterwards where they escalated a campaign of terror, specializing in car bombings and other violence that killed and injured hundreds, always blaming the violence on the communists.  Though the movie doesn’t show it, this is the backdrop to the film, where the Italian government deeply feared a repeat of what happened in Greece, where the coordinated actions of secret right-wing factions in the army, government, and judiciary suggest a Fascist military coup d’état was in place, as the bombing campaigns were designed to step up the pressure on the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency, at which point the Fascists would step in.  Called the strategy of tension, this was a disinformation campaign designed to divide, manipulate, and control public opinion through a strategy of publicly organized fear and propaganda tactics, starting rumors of CIA and NATO plots against the rapid spread of communism in Italy and Turkey, spreading panic among the population that would lead to a demand for stronger, more dictatorial governments eventually run by far-right military organizations.  

The film is told through quickly evolving chapter headings and largely seen through the eyes of Luigi Calabresi (Valerio Mastandrea), a likeable Milan police inspector with a quiet domestic life that includes a beautiful and very pregnant wife, Gemma (Laura Chiatti), where their marital happiness suggests a harmonious moral balance while all around them various political factions of Communists, Anarchists, and Fascists are demonstrating on the streets, all protesting the nation’s instability, usually resulting in violent confrontations with riot police.  The government fears the military junta in Greece will inspire a similar coup in Italy, where one of these factions will step in, believing Anarchists are behind the nationwide bombing campaign, but after the Milan bank bombing, all the known Anarchists are hauled in for questioning.  Most are let go, but a few leaders remain under intense, sleep-deprived interrogation, including Gisueppe Pinelli, (Pierfrancesco Favino), an articulate and outspoken Anarchist that many in the police division would like to blame, even though he despises both the extreme left and the right.  While there’s a developing connection between bomb materials and a former Anarchist, where the police believe his recent falling out with Pinelli is too convenient of an alibi, suspecting they masterminded the bombing.  But Calabresi is not convinced, as there’s no evidence connecting Pinelli to the crime, but police headquarters insists upon a bait and switch method, informing Pinelli that his partner has confessed, implicating his guilt, which has little effect initially, but the police demand he sign a document framing his former comrade.  When Calabresi steps out of the room briefly to prepare the statement, Pinelli goes flying out of an open window, falling to his death below.  The police in the room all claim he jumped, anguished over his apparent guilt, but Calabresi suspects something more, as does his widow who doesn’t for a second believe the reported suicide.  This alleged suicide breaks open the tense divisions between the various police, government, and judicial interests, where the police insist the Anarchists are behind the bombings, though they are thoroughly scrutinized by an Italian press that remains unconvinced.    

What follows is a swirling choreography of investigative inquiry, where government leaders and the police delve into possible leads and suspects, where Calabresi continues his search for the truth as well, which remains elusive, though newly uncovered evidence suggests it’s the far right that has been carrying out the campaign of terror all along, operating under the instructions of secret Fascist powers imbedded deep within the Italian government itself, but due to highly placed officials in all branches of government, they refuse to pursue this possibility, claiming the case is closed, so anything more is purely speculative, alleging political interference.  Rumors run rampant, however, where the CIA and NATO are implicated, also highly influential U.S. officials, though forensic reports determine the explosives themselves are of such a sophisticated nature that only the Italian Army has access to them.  By the time Calabresi develops a clear evidentiary path to the perpetrators, some three years after the bombings, he is murdered, shot in the head outside his apartment.  Not only does this stall the investigation, but even worse, since his death, all accused persons for the bombings have been acquitted, so no guilty parties have ever been found.  While the filmmaking is outstanding, meticulously researched, where the attention to detail is stunning, and the acting superb on all levels, making this one of the better political conspiracy movies since Z, but unlike that film, there is plenty of confusion surrounding so many characters, as the accumulation of information becomes overwhelming.  Like an epic movie, it feels like there is a cast of thousands, where outside of a few identifiable characters, the rest of the assembled cast can get lost in a blur of constantly disseminating information, where the audience loses tract of who many of the people are onscreen.  This is a familiar trait in recent Italian movies, where the critically acclaimed GOMORRAH (2008) was exactly the same way, another long and sprawling narrative that is utterly confusing, where it’s hard to tell which players are on what side.  Giordana might have made an even longer film, say three hours or more, as he toyed with length when he made THE BEST OF YOUTH, but he took certain liberties to keep the film close to two hours, streamlining the film with quick edits where at times it feels hurried and rushed, yet part of the enjoyment of the film is that electrifyingly fast pace that lends itself to a sleek and sophisticated political thriller.  Even with a few missed details, the film is extremely intelligent and highly entertaining throughout.