An alternate title for this post might be "Italy: More f-d up than Baltimore!"
I write that based on my reaction to the second of these films, Gomorra, which is about the Camorra, the super violent scary Naples-based criminal organization. As I was watching it, I thought, "man, this is like The Sopranos crossed with The Wire, with a soupcon of... Crash, or one of those other multiple separate stories movies." Except without the fakey moralizing of the last one there.
But let's backtrack.
My tiredness and lethargy from Monday night sadly stayed with me through much of Tuesday, which meant that I hit kind of a wall during my showing of Il Divo. Even the opulence of my surroundings (it was in the Winter Garden theatre, which is COOL. See above.) couldn't totally distract me from my tiredness.
The film is the story of Giulio Andreotti, who was on and off the leader of Italy from not long after the war until quite recently. But it's not a biopic. It focuses on a fairly short period of time towards the end of his last time as prime minister and then after, when he was brought before a court for mafia ties.
Therefore, the movie is, essentially, two hours of middle aged Italian guys walking and talking.
However, it's filmed with so much panache that all that talking ends up being very slick and cool.
And the film's great strength--and, in a way, its great weakness--is the performance at the center, by the actor who plays Andreotti. It's an amazingly controlled performance, making Andreotti into a man of incredible stiffness (literal and figurative) and opacity. But that very controlled aspect makes it a little hard for someone like me, who doesn't have a vivid context in which to put the film, or even personal memories of seeing the real Andreotti to compare, to connect fully with the film. So I admired it, I even liked it, but I felt consistently at a bit of a distance from it.
(There is an exception, one big emotional outburst by Andreotti, which was amazing because it was physically completely controlled but emotionally out there.)
(And, as insane as this may sound, my most vivid other memory of the film involved a giant... not ball, more like a giant suckling-pig-sized-and-shaped lump of mozzarella, served as a particular treat in one weird scene... something kind of like this, but bigger.)
The way I really know I hit a wall during the film, though, is that I walked out during the Q&A. Literally the day before this showing I'd been reading some other blog commenting on the festival, in which the author noted that people often leave before the Q&A. And I thought, hey, that's true, and that's weird. I mean, isn't that the point of the festival, that you not only get to see these films, but to hear what the filmmakers thought about them?
But this time, I was just too tired. So instead I headed home, and picked up pizza on the way to fit in with the Italian theme.
Then yesterday morning I set off early to see my second Italian film of the festival, Gomorra. It follows a bunch of different guys in and around Naples, all with ties to the Camorra. None who were the big cheeses, I think, though--so we had a young kid trying to get into a gang, two teenage knuckleheads who idolize Scarface and act like idiots in their attempts to be gangster-like, a tailor in a mob-assisted shop, a money man for the mob, who collects and delivers payments, and the public face of the waste management side of the game. It really did remind me in various ways of The Wire--but The Wire without the cops' story. It had the housing projects, the drugs, the warfare between gangs, the creeping influence of dirty money in legitimate worlds... and it had a little of the everything's connected mentality, though that was very, very underplayed. I liked that about this--it didn't try to draw everything together into a neat bow in which we find out that a is related to b in this particular way.
My only quibble is very slight, and with the editing. There are a lot of stories, and a couple of times we kind of lose track of one of the main characters for a little bit too long.
Oh, and at Gomorra I had another obscure famous person siting--Elvis Mitchell. He used to review movies at the New York Times, and I liked a lot of his reviews. Now he's got an interview show that's apparently very good, too, though I haven't seen it.
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