For director Gabriele Mainetti, competing in Venice, making films means thinking big. But it would be better if he could get his dreams of glory under control
One thing is certainly not lacking in Gabriele Mainetti, and it is ambition. Making films for him means thinking big. And no one wants to stop him from doing it, but learning to control his dreams of glory might help him. Surely it would have avoided that sense of overabundance, excess, excess that ends up suffocating his «Freaks Out», starting with ambition. The misadventures of the four circus performers who, looking for their comedian, end up in Rome after 8 September, where a Nazi with foresightedness seeks them to exploit their powers, becomes a kind of anthology of situations and scenes already seen.
Not cinephile quotations but something that lies between challenge and imitation, as he wanted to prove he is better than Tarantino and Baz Luhrmann, Terry Gillian and Radu Mihaileanu, Walt Disney and Fellini. There is in the film an exuberance of his own immoderation that stops at nothing, and that makes him mix “Bella Ciao” with the roundups in the ghetto, «Star Wars» and the ghost of Tod Browning. But without that sense of “flesh and desire, of sin and violence” that in the film “Freaks» of 1932 he knew how to transform monsters into painful and very true characters: here everything seems only exhibited, in search of an empty and free spectacle. Sometimes surprising, more often redundant and superficial.
Something that also happens in the Russian film
Kapitan Volkonogov bezhal
(Captain Volkonogov escaped) by Natasha Merkulova and Alekseij Chupov. Set in 1938, it tells of a security service soldier who understands the Stalinist folly of forced confessions (and related summary executions) and wants to ask the relatives of his victims for forgiveness. In a jumble of Christological fantasies, Slavic melancholies and political confusions worthy of a better cause.
September 8, 2021 (change September 9, 2021 | 19:44)
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