Still image from “Enea” by Pietro Castellitto.
Everyone knows Rome. And yet it is not fully dominated even by its own inhabitants. Because “he doesn’t want any owners”, as the ambitious Lebanese was warned in a famous sequence from the series “Roma Criminal”. Or to put it more simply, because three millennia of history have entangled a mystery that is as extraordinary as it is indecipherable. From the empire of the Caesars, to which more than one mafia tried; the beauty that takes your breath away and the garbage that clogs your nose; the poetry that Sulpicia or Trilussa wrote and the poetry that designed Francesco Totti’s boots in the countryside; Nuns and drug dealers, brushstrokes and lines, spells and traffic jams, the art of talking and getting through. Despite all this – and much more – the Eternal City has fed an equally endless history for centuries. Thousands of books, films or paintings have tried to tell about it. Practically every neighborhood has its own film. And there are more to come: at the recent Venice festival, up to six works were staged in Rome. So many magnifying glasses to show hidden, surprising and often dark corners. The spirit of Federico Fellini is still there. But today’s cinema tells a less magical vision: the agridolce vita.
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“It is a crossroads of wonderful contradictions. Holy, very vulgar, difficult. The highest and the lowest. This whole mess is held together thanks to a sense of humor. Rome forces you to educate yourself in irony. If not, it will kill you,” reflects Pietro Castellitto. There is no other way to explain that mortacci tua (literally “I shit on your dead”) can be used as an expression of tenderness. Or that a shrug of the shoulders is enough to desacralize everything. In the city where he was born 31 years ago, the filmmaker shot both his first feature film, Los Predators, and his second, Enea. And it tried exactly to rise while digging underground. Because his film follows the girl of a very wealthy bourgeoisie. So much so that the young man seeks the vital lymph that excessive comfort deprives him of in drugs, parties and violence. Here is all the evil that good Rome hides. Or as Alberto Barbera, artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, said: “la grande bruttezza.” [la gran fealdad]“.
Statue from “Una sterminata domenica” by Alain Parroni.
Unavoidable allusion to the work of Paolo Sorrentino. It may even have marked a turning point in the cinematic portrait of Rome. The Oscar for the best international film – few cities have appeared in so many feature films with statuettes – gave it a place in the history of cinema. But in doing so he left two more sentences. Once again, it was a stranger adopted by the city who told it best. After Vittorio de Sica from Sora, Fellini from Rimini or Pier Paolo Pasolini from Santo Stefano: Sorrentino from Naples. Or Gianfranco Rosi from Asmara (Eritrea), who in the documentary “Sacro Gra” was able to find strange existences on the side of the highway that not even the locals could imagine.
Maybe because Mamma Roma’s children cannot distance themselves from her to see her: their love-hate relationship is too strong, as another lover from abroad, Nicola Lagioia, describes in the book “The City of the Living”. With the great exception, of course, of the very Roman Roberto Rossellini. Furthermore, The Great Beauty closed a chapter in a sense: it was difficult to better film the decadent and magnificent beauty of the Trevi Fountain, the Spada Gallery or the Orange Garden. Since then, most of the cinema about Rome has been devoted to something else. And to areas and stories that are hardly visible in tourist photos. Like the empty Piazza Mazzini that Nanni Moretti crosses on a scooter in one of Future Sun’s best sequences. That is, the contemporary version of those scooter rides around Garbatella in Dear Diary. Like the coast of Ostia, the old port, marginalized and flooded with pills in Non essere cattivo by Claudio Caligari. Or like the real and fatal beating that the police gave Stefano Cucchi and which is revived in the film “In My Own Skin”.
Nanni Moretti (left) and Mathieu Amalric, in a still from “The Sun of the Future”.
In Una sterminata domenica, Alain Parroni’s award-winning debut, great beauty can only be seen from a distance. Like a view of domes and roofs from Janiculum Hill, perhaps the most sublime postcard of the Italian capital. However, the camera zooms in on the everyday lives of the three very young protagonists. They do not strive to build basilicas or coliseums: building a life is quite complicated. “It can be suffocating from within. Rome holds an ambiguity: it forces you to deal with time, you cannot ignore history, not even film history. It penetrates you, it can take on a certain weight. But at the same time, I grew up in the countryside where there is nothing, in the so-called periphery, and I am also influenced by Japanese cartoons or TV series,” notes the director. So it comes with a new, different vision. Heir to Romulus and Remus, but also to the anime. “From neorealism to [la serie] “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” he sums it up.
Which is reflected in a film that is as lively and chaotic as its characters. And in a Rome that he looks at with his eyes. “What have all these people done to deserve a statue?” says one of the three, skeptical of so much sculpture. “A sensual experience,” Barbera defined the film at the Venice Film Festival. Where Love Was Seen, by Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri, who searches the Tiber for the memories of her missing mother; or finally l’alba by Saverio Costanzo about the Cinecittà of the fifties, cradle of dreams and great Hollywood productions, but also of nightmares and unsolved crimes; The current revival of the famous studies, on the other hand, offers the umpteenth example of the endless Roman comings and goings.
An image from “Love” by Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri.
The same theme returns in Stefano Sollima’s Adagio, the final stroke of his fresco (Roma Criminal, Suburra, ACAB…) about the wildest side of the city. And full of metaphors to help explain it. In the plot, the parents’ past falls onto the shoulders of the new taxes. And on screen, there are constant power outages on the streets and an endless fire that corners the city. It’s easy to think of Malagrotta and the other garbage dumps that burned in those years. Or on public buses that burned. Local scandals with national and even global echoes. But of course there is also cause for jokes among the locals, with comments like “Attack in the heart of Rome.” Claimed by Atac [la empresa de transportes]” or “We haven’t seen anything like this since Nero.”
Here’s another key: For better or worse, nothing matters much in Rome. Even the biggest problems are ultimately diluted and put into perspective in the context of such an old story. The unbearable filth of the Tiber can transform even a poor, unfortunate person who falls into the water into a superhero, as in another acclaimed recent feature film, They Called Him Jeeg Robot by Gabriele Mainetti. A guy so strange and antisocial that instead of trying to save the planet he says, “People disgust me.” Okay, the few subway lines, the collapse every time it rains, or the threat of it Gentrification. But emperors, barbarian invasions and revolutions took place here. It won’t be that bad. “As far as I can remember, the Romans say that the city has never been worse,” emphasizes Castellitto. And Parroni adds: “So many things happen that it can lead to you doing nothing, that has to do with the Roman attitude.” That’s why, at the beginning, my characters are almost spectators in a film about Rome that lasts for millennia .” Of course, no one ever gets tired of watching it.
Piefrancesco Favino, in a still from “Adagio” by Stefano Sollima.
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