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BERLINALE 2010 Panorama / Italy

Aronadio’s One Life Maybe Two a disturbing Sliding Doors

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How to portray the frustrations of a generation that hears it has its whole life ahead of it yet invariably finds itself at the mercy of fate or society? Debut filmmaker Alessandro Aronadio, who studied psychology and wrote a thesis on the double in David Cronenberg’s films, does so by inventing a disturbing Sliding Doors for his main character in One Life Maybe Two [+see also:
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Matteo (Lorenzo Balducci) is taking his best friend to the hospital after the latter cuts his finger at the Waiting for Godot Pub (the tributes to the Nouvelle Vague also include the ending of The 400 Blows). Skidding on wet asphalt, Matteo crashes into the car of two undercover cops, who don’t take it too well and beat up the two young men.

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A lawyer (a cameo from journalist/screenwriter Andrea Purgatori) advises Matteo not to report the cops because they will surely get off. Thus, rage starts to build up in Matteo, who in the meantime has hooked up with Godot’s best-looking bartender (Isabella Ragonese), a rage further instigated by the ambiguous Ivan (Ivan Franek), a shady character known at the precinct.

But what if Matteo had braked in time? And there had been no crash, his daily life had continued as per usual, he had stayed at his poorly paid job in a plant nursery and met a young woman from a good family (Sarah Felberbaum)? He would have decided to become a Carabiniere, “as long as it shakes you up”, says his father, who in his son’s eyes sees that numbness from which he has always fled.

Aronadio seems to say there is increasingly less space for choice: “Destiny, society and chance end up deciding for [Matteo],” whose one or maybe two lives are destined to intertwine in an epilogue that looks at some dramatic events from Italian headlines, to the moments when – among the streets of Genoa during G8 and outside a highway rest stop – victim and victimizer come face to face, and perhaps recognize one another.

Produced by Anna and Sauro Falchi’s A Movie Productions, One Life Maybe Two will be released in Italy in April by Lucky Red.

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(Translated from Italian)

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