Can a closed and almost inaccessible place become at the same time an elegy on suspended time and a research on what it means to continually negotiate one’s role? This is what Leonardo Di Costanzo tries to do in his new film, “Ariaferma”, inexplicably kept out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. It is a cinema of intervals that never seem to pass that of the Neapolitan director (“The interval” was the title of one of his previous films), a flow of images and stories marked by physical and mental closures as well as by sudden luminous openings, where the camera tries to capture not things, but what is “between” things. The story told in this new work of his has as its theater an old nineteenth-century prison now in disuse, located in an inaccessible and unspecified area of the Italian territory. Due to bureaucratic problems, transfers are blocked and a dozen detainees, along with a few agents, are waiting for new destinations. In a suspended atmosphere, the rules of separation are loosened and new (possible) forms of relationships are glimpsed among the remaining men.
To act as a catalyst between these two worlds that are approaching and moving away along a continuously renegotiated border line (compromises, denials, protests, proposals), there are Gaetano Gargiulo and Carmine Lagioia, two “restrained” characters, masterfully rendered by the alienated acting of a pair of aces like Servillo and Orlando. The two are, in spite of themselves, the guardians of this gloomy, stale and dying place, full of windows, doors, corridors, cells, grates: authentic “holes” in which to sink your gaze. From the encounter / clash between these two bodies and these two individual stories “which have nothing in common”, the underground movement that animates the film is born, and which provides it with tension, dynamism, rhythm, almost musicality. If on the one hand – as is obvious – the two will be forced to rethink their identity, on the other hand they will remain trapped in that interval that from the dimension of space becomes more and more a form of time and existence. And it is from here, finally, that the extraordinary humanity of the film shines through.
Direction: Leonardo Di Costanzo; Interpreters: Toni Servillo, Silvio Orlando, Fabrizio Ferracane, Salvatore Striano; Film script: Leonardo Di Costanzo, Bruno Oliviero, Valia Santella; Photography: Luca Bigazzi; Music: Pasquale Scialò; Assembly: Carlotta Cristiani; Scenography: Luca Servino; Costumes: Florence Emir. Distribution: Vision. Italy / Switzerland, 117 ‘, 2021.
In Florence he is in these rooms: Flora.
October 15, 2021 | 16:30
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