01/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Alain Parroni makes room for an explosive aesthetic in his debut feature film, co-produced by Wim Wenders, which follows three aimless youngsters between the suburbs and central Rome

Enrico Bassetti, Federica Valentini and Zackari Delmas in An Endless Sunday

“How long is this day?”. The three Centennial protagonists of An Endless Sunday [+see also:
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interview: Alain Parroni
film profile] - Alain Parroni’s debut feature film which has been selected in the 80th Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti line-up - are kids from the Roman coast whose vocabulary is as limited as it is functional, conveying a malaise which is even more existential than social. Although “believing in something is hard work”, Alex, Brenda and Kevin (Enrico Bassetti, Federica Valentini and Zackari Delmas) don’t exclude the possibility/need to “get on and do something”. And when Brenda, who’s with Alex, tells him that her period is late, he convinces himself that “it’s better to be young and beautiful as parents than old and senile”. Among the many tattoos on Brenda’s body is the saying “carpe diem”, one of the Latin poet Horace’s most misunderstood expressions, which encouraged us to enjoy life and the good things it offers, even if there aren’t very many, but which has actually become an exhortation to live joyfully and carefree. Even though the visual side of things is far more important to Gen-Z than the textual, the youngest member of the group, Kevin, opts for an intermediate solution and tags every wall he comes across with his name. He’d like to be a Pokemon trainer when he grows up.

The suburbs where the trio lives are so suburban, sheep can be seen grazing when you look out the window. But Alex, Brenda and Kevin prefer to spend the day in an old, mayonnaise-yellow, convertible Fiat Punto, drifting between decaying industrial material, mushroom-shaped reservoir towers, viaducts, and high-voltage pylons. Then they travel further, to the centre of the capital, listening to Pope Bergoglio from a distance as he appears in St. Peter’s Square on that endless summer Sunday. When something upsets Alex, he speeds off on his Garelli Tiger 125 enduro motorbike, heading back towards the city where he may or may not do something incredibly ill-judged. Over and above the obvious reference to Truffaut’s Jules and Jim-style ménage à trois, it’s hard not to be reminded of a certain kind of American road movie from the Seventies.

Co-produced by Wim Wenders, the film doesn’t outwardly claim to be a form of social protest, nor does it contain the heretic and crude realism of the D’Innocenzo brothers’ Bad Tales [+see also:
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interview: Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo
film profile] or Boys Cry [+see also:
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interview: Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo
film profile]. Alain Parroni was born in 1992 in the Roman countryside; Alex, Brenda and Kevin are his “younger siblings”; the director juxtaposes their world, which is sucked into the virtual vortex-space of a smartphone, to the subculture of Brenda’s grandma, awash with popular wisdom, magic and rituals. Welcoming the invitation to adopt a Wendersian approach of anxiety and restlessness, the young director expresses the fully intense, explosive aesthetic of a reality flooded with the blinding light of summer and with a sunset which paints everything reddish-brown. His love for form is especially evident in the sequence of grainy still-frames which show Brenda and Kevin kissing behind tourists taking selfies, or others where we see Alex moving around frantically in the dark along the riverbank, stark naked with a gun in his arms. “There’s a place inside of me that I wasn’t aware of”, Rilke wrote. “Now everything’s going to end up there”. The protagonists of An Endless Sunday don’t dare take to the road for real because they wouldn’t know where to go. They simply need to be on the move incessantly.

An Endless Sunday is an Italian, German and Irish co-production by Fandango, Alcor, Art Me Pictures and Road Movies, in league with RAI Cinema. International sales are entrusted to Fandango Sales.

(Translated from Italian)