Pippo Mezzapesa’s film, Elodie’s film debut, uses black and white to fill the story with an out-of-place emphasis
The new film by Pippo Mezzapesa “I eat your heart”in competition in the Orizzonti section at the recent Venice Film Festival (where he did not receive awards) was somehow “swallowed up” by his interpreter, singer Elodie making her screen debut, which ended up attracting all the attention and comments. Inevitable in a festival where worldliness has long since stifled critical discourse. But now that the film arrives in cinemas, it is worth trying a less emotional approach to better deal with an operation that seems to want to take a certain trend in Italian cinema and seriality even more to extremes.
The first thing that catches the eye is abandonment of color for a black and white that Michele D’Attanasio’s photography pushes towards an uncommon chromatic radicality. In the film the shades of gray disappear and everything is told as the clash between the two opposite colors of the palette, like the struggle of light against darkness. The problem is that there is very little light here while it abounds in the darkness. Real but also symbolic.
The film begins in 1960, in the Gargano, with the massacre of the Malatesta family by the Camporeale family: a ruthless and cruel execution that should end with the bodies abandoned to the hunger of the pigs if little Michele, hidden in the pigsty, fails to save the remains of his loved ones. In addition of course to promise revenge.
Forty-four years later the revenge was carried out: the Camporeale portraits hanging on the house wall have all, except one, a nail on the face, proof not only of the execution but also of the scar done to the enemy’s face, and Michele now fifty years old (Tommaso Ragno) leads the family business with an iron fist. To break the balance will be Andrea Malatesta (Francesco Patané), twenty years old more interested in women than in power, who begins to court the attractive Marilena Camporeale (Elodie), white widow of the opponent chieftain, forced to go into hiding to avoid Michele’s revenge .
The orders of the head of the family to Andrea are useless, useless the attempts to find other women for him, useless the calls of the Camporeale to the strong-willed Marilena, whom that courtship accepts and favors. The discovery that the woman is pregnant causes things to precipitate: she moves to the Malatesta family, abandoning the two children she had with her husband, and everyone knows that that situation can only be washed in her blood. Triggering a new chain of vendettas.
A war between clans nor particularly original nor surprising (even in the small final twist) but the direction of Mezzapesa, also through the choice of that black and white so contrasted and “dramatic”, full of an emphasis and a grandiloquence that seem frankly out of place. Because as Godard taught us that every shot is a question of morals and the form can never be neutral, here is also the way in which this sort of Apulian update of “Romeo and Juliet” comes to life on the screen mythologizing and idealizing what should only be a chain of crimes and violent cruelty.
Of course, Mezzapesa did not invent the roadthe television series based on the film “Gomorrah” it is a kind of book in progress of how criminals can be transformed into “heroes of evil”, prompting viewers to forget the moral framework in which their actions should be seen and judged. Using the power of cinematic realism to fascinate and enchant. But in this film it seems to me that – voluntarily or not – we are trying to take a further step forward, that of raising the stupid revenge of two criminal families towards the dimension of absolute tragedy, even if we were not even in front of the myths of the Atrides. And perhaps it should be remembered that excess is a dimension to be handled with great care and that often ends up generating monsters. Cinematographic and moral.
September 18, 2022 (change September 20, 2022 | 21:22)
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