02/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Claudio Casale’s feature-length fiction debut is set in an ambiguous spiritual community where a young couple are looking to recharge, but sadly our interest wanes as the story progresses

Social media addiction is the new form of slavery. Receiving positive comments seems to activate a certain area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, which also plays a key role in reward and drug addiction behaviours. But taking comfort and refuge in communities and micro-communities is a tendency long pre-dating the internet. Religious sects are as old as mankind itself and the new age communities which have flourished since the ‘70s represent “an unspecified religion corresponding to the uncertainties of the individual in our times”, as French sociologist Françoise Champion explains. Now outmoded, these communities are being replaced by new dependencies, of which the film world has all but made a subgenre, ranging from documentarian approaches exploring anthropological phenomena all the way through to horror films. The Year of the Egg [+see also:
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film profile] - Claudio Casale’s first feature film which was developed and produced within the eleventh edition of Biennale College Cinema and screened in the 80th Venice Film Festival – also falls somewhere within this subgenre world, updating an arguably timeless field of thought.

The protagonists in the film are a young couple, Gemma and Adriano (Yile Vianello and Andrea Palma), who are expecting a child and who decide to enter into a spiritual community called The Community of the Egg (which has been a symbol of fertility since Egyptian times), led by a woman (Regina Orioli) calling herself Guru Rajani. This oriental-style cult seems to revolve around a huge golden egg, like the ones we see in patisserie windows at Easter. The daily rituals and routines which the group of young couples are expected to follow are governed by strict rules, and anyone who breaks them is sent away. The audience starts to suspect that there’s some sort of unintentional humour behind it all, but the director - who boasts considerable documentary experience having studied film direction at the New York Film Academy - knows what he’s doing. During a conversation between the couple, Adriano says: “All these dramatics! It’s just a mix of different cultures and religions”. But the film isn’t a farce; it’s actually pretty troubling. The couple’s faith in their new endeavour begins to waver when tragedy strikes: Gemma loses her baby. It’s an event which floors them, creates a distance between them and only helps them grow closer when they’re involved in another unbelievable experience.

Casale divides the film into chapters - Guscio, Albume, Tuorlo – and incorporates computer-generated images of flowing, magmatic, pulsating, multicoloured masses into the story, as if they were a living thing within a body. But as the story advances in a mostly predictable, linear fashion, the audience’s interest in the fate of these two young people wanes, as it follows their escape from urban utilitarianism and their search for purifying spirituality. The meaning behind the final twist is left to the viewers’ imagination, but they might not be in the mood for enigmas… It’s possible the director wanted to make sense of the subcultural phenomenon in question, or to inscribe it within a modern-day context through fiction, but unfortunately the film’s screenplay lacks the appropriate structure to allow this.

The Year of the Egg is produced by Diero Film in league with Biennale College.

(Translated from Italian)