editorial
twelve o’clock, November 18, 2021 – 10:37
from Valerio Cappelli
Naples, we all know, a stratified, complex, contradictory city. Yet, at least in its public dimension, it does not have a thousand colors, as Pino Daniele sings: it has two. There is the color of politics and that of culture. And Paolo Sorrentino is right when he remembers that in Naples, a promiscuous city, everything is mixed, the top and the bottom. There is a city that discovers that it has a deficit of 5 billion, and a new mayor who threatens to resign if the government does not put his wallet, but in the budget there is no trace of aid; a city that remains difficult and fails to convert a great heritage into industry where culture is the domain of political power, used as an instrument of consensus. And there are many people who have decided to leave Naples and go and live outside. Then there is the Naples of this golden moment, represented by the artists. The prodigal sons expatriated to Rome who in maturity recover the Neapolitan roots. Paolo Sorrentino presenting a preview of his most personal and perhaps most beautiful film, shot in Naples, was the hand of God, where through his condition as an orphan at 16 he recounts the loss and lack; tells the love for cinema; tells the talent that feeds on fear, when the flower of adolescence is cut, as in Bohme, where the protagonists promise to meet again at the season of flowers).
Mario Martone who signs an international show, theOthello, at the beginning of the season, with a completely new perspective: the story of a femicide where Desdemona (the Cilento Maria Agresta) sings the Ave Maria with a gun in her hand and anything but a sacrificial victim. And Sorrentino with Martone was in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where the Ischian Leonardo Di Costanzo led Ariaferma, narrating the prison from a completely new point of view. In all these three films, one of the protagonists Toni Servillo, born in Caserta who just can’t leave, says he couldn’t live anywhere else. Martone to remind us that growth (let’s leave rebirth alone) was a path that began in the 90s: research theater, independent cinema and a fleet of technicians of the big screen, men and women, directors
photography, editors and
so on, which have contributed to the success of many Italian films in the last thirty years. Finally there is Gomorrah,
the best-selling series (193 countries in the world), the most iconic, the most controversial (to the center-right exponents who since the first of the 58 episodes said: Naples isn’t just that stuff, governor De Luca has joined). To the criticisms Roberto Saviano replies that later Gomorrah no one became a criminal, that the state is not in the series because it is hired
the point of view of the Camorra, who are always and in any case the losers, and by them the state is experienced as an interference. To the criticisms of the city just expressed by the French newspaper Le Figaro (Naples Third World), Paolo Sorrentino and his alter ego Toni Servillo at the presentation of the film gave an artist response, recalling two hilarious anecdotes that date back to the time of their debut. Servillo: On the set a little boy approached me and asked me, what is the title of this film? The extra man. Ah, the add ‘already seen. And Sorrentino: We were driving around in an old convertible car, crammed into it, there were six inside, a boy tells me: do you call him the extra man in the sense that you are cramped in the car? Too bad that Naples is not in good shape even in the Italian rankings. In fact, from the recent survey on the quality of life, it is second to last, second only to Crotone. Little, too little for a metropolis that has all the numbers today to go back to being one of the cultural capitals of Europe.
November 18, 2021 | 10:37
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