It would take Antonioni not to lose sight of the truth of his feelings
In the marital crisis, first whispered and then screamed, of Carlo and Margherita everything stems from the Camus-like term “misunderstanding” that drags behind the essence of the truth of the words and their obligatory duplicity. A word like “Fidelity” which resonates in the elegant Netflix series directed ex aequo by Andrea Molaioli (“The girl by the lake” and the series “Suburra”) and Stefano Cipani (My brother chases dinosaurs “) but above all in the novel Einaudi by Marco Missiroli from which it is based, best seller and Young Witch Award in 19.
Reduced by Alessandro Fabbri, Elisa Amoruso and Laura Colella, the ambitious production not a little betrays the most profound work in Missiroli (who gives himself a mini cameo), a kind of phenomenological analysis and also a work on words with the concept of fidelity at the center: what do you give up with fidelity? What is lost in ourselves? Of the author’s para-scientific and cold intention (apart from the narrative changes of the story) little remains in the series, it would take Antonioni not to betray hergiven that the final scene of the “Adventure” sums up many things under discussion in this story of impossible loves, impossible betrayals and impossible reconciliations.
But with the pretense of making it a VIP international product, we lose sight of the very important thing, the truth of the feelings and above all the context on which they develop, which is important, being closely connected. But the Milan that we see in the film very fake, precisely that contemporary fashion, every beautiful and sunny house, starting with the one in Concordia that starts the story; every restaurant or office overlooks the Duomo and there is a great panoramic bustle among the skyscrapers of the Gae Aulenti area; every clean street, every tram on time and not crowded, the clubs all very fashionable, branded whiskey, but if a non-contract professor and his lady real estate agent (architect and interior designer failed) went to have a drink like in the film , it would take half a salary.
Big drinks, endless taxis, friends who must be gossips and below the level of the intellectual average. And when the prof. he can’t take it anymore and makes an escape to Rimini from his beautiful blonde student who has sent his marriage into a tailspin, even there is a perfect citizen, the understanding dad (better her mother, the good Maria Paiato who perhaps turns out to be betrayed after the death of her husband). Always the sun, never fog, always a 5-star hotel, but the life inside rots, the eyes cloud over, ambiguity and ambivalence play sovereign and make their moves at emotional chess. This garment, which may seem the surface of a deeper novel, becomes its essence and limit in the film and everything takes place as a reflection behind an aquarium: the bar, the art gallery, the toasts, the wonderful apartments, the happy and unhappy hours, while and in the meantime the crumbling of securities and this passion of man on the verge of youth for the girl, as in the best literary and cinematographic occasions.
She too, Margherita, then accepts the compromise with his physiotherapist a la Marlon Brando del “Selvaggio”, but it will be a love in the short term because the artist is ready to take the place of the failed writer or in crisis. Who in the meantime becomes a discoverer of talents and even in the blink of an eye is sent to Paris by a publisher who gives advances that no one dreams of them, money that circulates only in the imagination of the intellectual series, where you play Woody Allen, you pass with snobbery from the trendy club to the university bathrooms (even the 5-star ones) where the famous “misunderstanding” takes place, which instead is very clear and costs the career of the young teacher who teaches the hard art of writing, even though he doesn’t have it at the moment.
In short, a shimmering product of Milanese images reflections in the shops of the big chic brands that make the city fake and livid and also the dialogues breaded with stereotypes, on the context of a rich bourgeois environment with crowded bookstores and many artists (or artists as they used to say) around the house, which induces even following him, one remains entangled, thanks also to calculated erotic scenes that are very soft but sufficient to jump the title in the standings. The actors are good but often embarrassed, which maybe in the end it works, starting with Michele Riondino and the Ronconian Lucrezia Guidone in a Vitti-like mood, who try to restrain the soul mel with a touch of frigidity that never pain and often postpones to the incommunicability of Antonioni’s Milanese Night.
March 9, 2022 (change March 9, 2022 | 10:31)
© Time.News