Avati’s Figlio Più Piccolo a cruel critique of Italian status quo
Pupi Avati’s “father trilogy” ends with Il Figlio Più Piccolo [+see also:
trailer
film profile] ("The Youngest Son"), he says: “La Cena per Farli Conoscere was about a deadbeat father who gets close to his three daughters through three different women. Then there was Giovanna’s Father, about an overprotective father oblivious to the madness in which his daughter is sinking. And now this father, who is the most disgraceful, the most abominable”.
Christian De Sica, the king of the Christmas blockbusters, plays Luciano Baietti, an unscrupulous businessman and player (“He’s like those slimy guys from the neighbourhood who instead of booking a hotel room buys the entire hotel”, said the director), who remembers his son Baldo only when he’s on the edge of a financial collapse and risking jail. His trusted advisor Bollino (Luca Zingaretti) tells him to use Baldo as a “front” for his businesses, the same way he had used the boy’s mother (Laura Morante), whom he left moments after the altar to raise two small children on her own.
More than a character, Baietti is a symbol of the “boorish” Italy of recent years, of an amoral and immoral country that has become vulgar, dominated by a ruling class of charlatans who have gotten rich through blackmail and corruption. “It would be easy, superficial to blame politics. The fact is that the present has become unacceptable, even for a moderate like myself,” said Avati, who is renouncing his usual disdain for political cinema and promises to dedicate himself from now on less to nostalgia, the crux of many of his films, and more to the present, “to monitor and keep an eye on it, given that indifference and incorrectness are pervading our world.”
The last bastion to fight this indifference? According to this “cruel and ruthless” film (as Morante calls it), it is the naiveté of Baldo (newcomer Nicola Nocella, a graduate of the National Film School). “People like him,” says Avati in conclusion, “do exist, with that somewhat foolish, disarming innocence of those who believe in dreams”.
Produced by Pupi and Antonio Avati’s Duea Film, in collaboration with Medusa Film (who is also distributing), Il Figlio Più Piccolo is being released on February 19 on approximately 300 screens.
(Translated from Italian)
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