More than 20 years after the film, the eight episodes of the series on Disney + stage the story of a free community, updated and enriched
21 important years in gender politics have passed since Ozpetek’s film The ignorant fairies that in 2001 launched the Roman terrace of the Ostiense district, a gathering of a family ready to transgress every rule, multi-cultural, linguistic and sexual. Other times but without exaggerating, 2001 was the year of opening towards the next and now we have lowered the social shutters: the raft that previously sailed calmly, today is in the storm of the reaction winds, see abortion question. But the director has drawn from it scripts with his usual friend Gianni Romoli and the usual producer friend Tilde Corsi, a series in 8 very colorful episodes for the Disney platform, capable of certain cheeks and notoriously open to LGBTQ + themes.
The episodes are partly directed personally by Ozpetek and partly by his historic and faithful assistant Gianluca Mazzella and enriched by a new beautiful very vintage theme, (“Throwing love”), a gift from his friend Mina, a well-known gay icon whose voice could not be missing. The poetics remain that of the Turkish director in Italy: the story, amid a thousand doubts and nuances, melancholy and joy, of a free community, to which a naturally homo couple has added and the part concerning a terminally ill patient with AIDS has been removed. A lot of time has passed and the menu has been enriched, but the famous meatballs are still delicious and there are many crickets and talking parrots; we marry civilly and argue uncivilely, a trans has to fight against the provincial oppressions of the family, but overall things are better than yesterday for individuals, worse for the community.
For there are some dissonant voices, like that of Serra Yilmaz, not convinced that all this progress is real and that new marriages are not just the copy of straight ones, while there are still homophobes around who beat it up. Full of rhythm and squabbles, sounds and noises, feathers and tears, even of gay salamelecchi, full of very typical language and humor (sometimes you risk mannerism), the series works in the transversality of its options, from the predominant ones sentimental, up to the others, so as not to seem completely out of the real world. However, he runs a risk, as did the film, Ozpetek’s first success with Buy and Accorsi.
The start follows that of the other fairies, and has always been the slightly improbable part of the story: the protagonist Michele, the intense Eduardo Scarpetta, the last representative of the glorious art family that unites his family to the De Filippo, meets in the bookshop, where he contends for a book of poems by the Turkish Nazim Hikmet, the handsome married Luca Argentero, immediately available. In fact, a relationship is born, despite the expecting wife not only temporal, really pregnant: very good Cristiana Capotondi, also perfect in the following metamorphosis and in the collection of the stickers of existential doubts. But a short love that homo of her husband causes a motorcycle accident, even if Michele, who paints scenes at the Opera house, has time to present his conquest to the table gossip who welcomes the straight transfugee with some suspicion, while admiring the prey. From his death (but every now and then he reappears as a good ghost) the gossip circle opens, first the misunderstandings, then when the wife finally becomes aware that her husband had a masculine lover, the doubts begin whether to join that folk group because after all, and a mysterious mutual feeling, the woman feels a strange attraction for her rival and friends at De Filippi.
Here the story becomes jagged, stop and go in the midst of all those friends who gather at the table and live in the same building, even with three elderly Graces, the three Marys who at the entrance are gossiping about who enters and leaves the building (they were also in the film but at the last they were cut). So all a gentle whisper of rivalry, jealousies, sweetness, remorse, regrets (a mixture like meatballs): first the two women (perfect Ambra Angiolini and Anna Ferzetti) quarrel out of jealousy, then the two boys (including Filippo Scicchitano who deserves beautiful occasions like this) find the civil courage to marry with exultant families and friends, while Paola Minaccioni suffers for love, grandiose in her banal solitude, but she too will settle down thanks to the trans. And last but not least, Serra’s grandson arrives from Istanbul, the macho Burak Deniz who falls in love platonically but not with Capotondi and takes her to the Bosphorus on a romantic holiday that in the end risks an embrace.
Very good actors, starting with Scarpetta although he does not have the phisique du role having in his DNA the farces of his great-grandfather, but fills the character with the shadows and suspicions of a long solitude, while almost needless to say of Serra’s psychosomatic perfection, never so partially, which he tells in the finale of started a painful and unprecedented love story. And as always elegant and witty Carla Signoris in Crozza, versatile and nice even here even if she tries to ruin the party a little but, even though she is a vintage friend of generals, in the end her bourgeois voice joins that of the pride pride. Of course, everything in the film speaks of Ferzan and his coordinates (there are the paintings he himself painted in the past), including the reading of the coffee grounds entrusted to the unsuspecting Milena Vukotic, as an apparition to remember that of Elena Sofia Ricci in the group of seduced, married and abandoned. The series, even in its inevitable repetitions, lies precisely in the double experience, real and cinematic, of the director, of his privileged terrace in the house of which everyone feels protected, has the keys and each does his part, ignites his loves and his stove.
June 22, 2022 (change June 22, 2022 | 11:11)
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