GIVEN THE DOWNBEAT TONE of much of the Italian cinema represented in this year’s Open Roads series, it may not be mere coincidence that several entries pay tribute to the benevolent social reformism espoused by Francis, the current Pope. Gianfranco Pannone’s The Smallest Army in the World, the most earnest of the lot, is an engaging, if officially endorsed look into a world rarely glimpsed: the training of young men who comprise the Swiss Guard, protectors of the Pope and the Vatican for six hundred years. Produced by Vatican Television, the documentary follows the experiences of eleven men from Italy, Switzerland, and France, all of them apparently devout Catholics. Although each seems aware that this highly selective, peacekeeping “army” is something of an aesthetic residue of a once serious military force the men nevertheless seem proud to serve before returning to their occupations as engineers, plumbers, chefs, and theology students. We see them going through rigorous physical routines, learning to speak Italian, and preening in their archaic but colorful uniforms as they engage with tourists and keep watch just steps outside the Pope’s quarters. One trainee wonders how Francis’s choice not to sleep in the Papal palace, as his predecessors did, has made for a more genial atmosphere. The movie cultivates such a serene and insulated mood, suited to the precincts in which it unfolds, that one can hardly imagine the turmoil that lies just beyond the Vatican’s walls and weaves its way into many of the other movies in the series.
This includes Daniele Luchetti’s narrative feature Call Me Francesco—the Pope, which, though more ambitious than Pannone’s documentary, succumbs to the conventions of a political thriller as it chronicles the earlier years of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the priest who became the pope, struggling against the military dictatorship in Argentina during the 1970s. The Pope is also heard in the opening of Gabriele Mainetti’s tense thriller They Call Me Jeeg, as he pleads on television against bombs and violence while we watch a low-life thief running through crowds of demonstrators, past the Castel Saint’Angelo and along the Tiber, from two thugs out to kill him.
While genre proves the rule rather than the exception in several of the movies, a few try valiantly to surprise us. Who would guess from its title, for example, that Long Live the Bride is neither a romantic drama nor a lightweight comedy. In fact, it’s anything but a celebration of marriage, and the only bride in sight is not a character in the movie at all but a lovely, fleeting image of a young woman in bridal gown, whose wordless, groom-free appearances carry the kind of symbolic weight Fellini often imposed on youthful embodiments of the pure and unattainable in a corrupt world. This is not to say that the movie, written and directed by Ascanio Celestini, does not have its charms—all of them emanating from a downbeat cast of losers, thieves, pimps, whores, and murderers, teetering between the carnivalesque and Neorealism, with more than a touch of heartbreaking humanism. Like the protagonist Nicola (Celestini)—a misguided visionary, part clown, part holy fool—they go about their shady operations with an air of innocent desperation that seems all but forgivable, given the strains of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” heard on the soundtrack throughout.
While not exactly Tristan and Isolde, Fausto and Nadine, the odd couple in Claudio Cupellini’s arresting, weirdly titled The Beginners are no less fated to be together, despite the seemingly arbitrary, shifting circumstances forced on them by a plot that refuses to sit still. She’s an aspiring model in Paris, where the story begins; he’s an Italian hotel worker with grandiose ambitions, who later coruns a nightclub called “Alaska,” the movie’s Italian title. From her first pouty fit and his pushy need to impress her, it’s all down- and uphill. And though it ends more or less on a happy note, if it went on for two more hours, we know that additional fickle turns and disastrous occurrences would ensue. Indeed, much of the plot seems contrived for contrivance sake—as if to flaunt whimsy as the essence of fate—including a bookended frame, in which first Fausto and then Nadine serve prison sentences for different murders, triggered by clumsy acts of self-defense. In short, Fausto and Nadine are volatile, borderline personalities, prone to impulsive behavior and crying jags, and hopelessly codependent. In the wrong hands—which is to say, directed less expertly, or played by two personalities even a tad less affecting and engaging than the riveting Elio Germano and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey—we might be more bothered by the melodramatic mechanics that threaten to propel the movie beyond credibility. As Open Roads often demonstrates, even if original works and ingenious directors are in short supply, there seems no end to the lineup of appealing, talented young actors in the current Italian cinema.
On the outskirts of Rome, Ostia, like other Italian ports under mafia control, is the all too apt milieu for Claudio Caligari’s grim Don’t Be Mean. Essentially a dispiriting buddy movie, it follows the fates of Vittorio (Alessandro Borghi) and Cesare (Luca Marinelli). Trapped in a life of petty thievery and drug dealing, Vittorio, with his girlfriend’s encouragement, tries to go straight, while the weaker Cesare catapults into final disaster after the death of his little sister, the only image of decency that seems to move him. While the final scene suggests the promise of a new life, it hardly dispels the oppressive gloom that pervades the atmosphere and guarantees an equally dead-end future for the characters.
Like any minifestival, the series has its share of movies of self-consciously topical relevance. Edoardo Falcone’s strained comedy God Willing might have risen above its PC premise were it less one-dimensional. It tells of a brilliant, thoroughly narcissistic surgeon, tolerant enough to accept a son who may be gay, but horrified that the boy’s real secret is that he wants to be a priest. More poignant is Carlo Lavagna’s Arianna. “I was born twice. Actually three times,” says the young protagonist, who, biologically declared neither male nor female at birth, has been subject to various medical procedures and raised as a girl, until, confronted with contrary feelings and longings in adolescence, she breaks down and seeks counseling. The movie’s success is singularly owing to the performance of first-time actress Ondina Quadri, whose very look and physical deportment capture the tensions between codified “masculine” and “feminine” behavior more naturally and convincingly than one can imagine.
The sixteenth edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema runs June 2 through 8 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
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