In Gianni Zanasi’s comedy, a war in Europe with Leo and Miriam Leone. The director: “It’s a film born in 2019, I don’t predict the future, it’s the future that goes backwards”
It’s easy to say dystopian. Reality, at times, is so unsettling that it surpasses cinematic fictions. What would happen if the unthinkable happened, namely a war in the heart of Europe? When Gianni Zanasi and his screenwriters, Lucio Pellegrini and Michele Pellegrini, asked the question behind the new film by the Emilian director, War. The desired war – presented yesterday in the Gran Public section of the Rome Film Festival (it will be in the hall with Vision from 10 November) -, it was 2019 and the idea of an everyday life marked by news from the front seemed, in fact, unthinkable. «Discovering while I was in slow motion that Russia had invaded Ukraine had a very bad effect on me. Cinema should attack reality, not the other way around. A friend of mine wrote to me “You are a seer”. I replied “No, I do not foresee the future, it is the future that is going backwards”. About Putin’s war I only say one thing: absolute horror. I have nothing else to add”. None of the protagonists of his romantic comedy, namely the clam farmer Tom (Edoardo Leo), Lea, psychologist (Miriam Leone), Mauro, manager of a pub (Giuseppe Battiston), imagines being on the eve of an armed conflict that it will bring out the best and the worst in each of them. The spark is the brutal murder of a girl accused of six Spanish boys. Their government accuses ours of illegal detention and the escalation leads to an attack, with Spain and France allied against Italy.
Complexity
Between camouflage suits, armed paramilitary volunteers, armored personnel on the city streets, spies and generals, there is room for a love story. As they said: put some flowers in your cannons. “We imagined a war that arises in a politically weakened Europe. Each country follows its own drift, in the somewhat hysterical search for identity. And the closer the outbreak approaches, the more people’s lives precipitate in a sense of urgency for which there is no more time for an aperitif, the spa, a Champions League match. There is only time to say: “Are you friend or foe?”. “Do you love me or hate me?”. It is a kind of burning fever in which one feels life like never before. In this context, each expresses what he has inside, good or bad. Here is the paradox of the film, which has nothing to do with real horror. I do not pretend to say how a real war is born – continues the director of Don’t think about it and Too much grace -. Like everyone since last spring I have been shocked, it is as if they want to take us back to a world in black and white. With my cinema I want to bring back color. Films have the power to express complexity. Conflict is the engine of human existence, it is vital, indispensable ». In the film Zanasi entrusts Battiston, with whom he has worked several times, an invective against the 70 years of peace that have softened souls and in favor of the regenerative force of war. The idea of him, it is clear, is different. “Let’s get kisses on each other instead.”
October 17, 2022 (change October 17, 2022 | 21:17)
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