20/08/2009

“Experimentation is the true key to freedom, because it produces new things,” says director Pasquale Marrazzo, whose fourth feature, Sogno il Mondo il Venerdì (“I Dream the World on Friday”), was presented at Locarno in the Filmmakers of the Present sidebar. The film alternates, somewhat unevenly, between melodrama (a mother thinks she recognizes her neighbour as her own son), political drama (touching upon work-related deaths) and musical.

Stories (often of desperation) graze and then intertwine in the raw, hyper-realistic and sweltering outskirts of Milan. Karim, a Tunisian looking to buy his working papers, tries to rob an Indian; Betty is a transsexual in love with a banker who is addicted to gambling; while Irene lives with Luigi and must come to terms with her past and her alcoholism.

These marginal and marginalized characters burst often into English songs, written – with the exception of the last one, by Marianne Faithfull – by Marrazzo, with music by Sergio Cocchi.

The effect is distancing, perhaps because of the uneven singing talents and quality of songs. But even less convincing is some of the didactic dialogue (“I chose to work in a hospital to exorcise my fear of death”), which is overly written – and sometimes hammed up by markedly theatrical actors. It moreover clashes with some of the more naturalistic performances (above all, Anis Gharbi and Giovanni Brignola) and the director’s criticism of a style of filmmaking in which “everything must be said and all the characters must be transparent”.

Produced by Marrazzo through his company N.O.I Film, in collaboration with The Family, Sogno il Mondo il Venerdì will be distributed in Italy by Gianluca Arcopinto’s La Fabbrichetta. The Rome release is set for August 21 while on August 28 it will open in Milan, Turin, Bologna and Florence.

(Translated from Italian)