Review: Lubo
- VENICE 2023: Franz Rogowski plays a Yenish nomad in Switzerland of 1939 in Giorgio Diritti’s film, which directs our attention towards theories advocating the elimination of difference

Franz Rogowski is one of the most sought-after European actors of the hour, and in the early months of 2023 he played lead roles in two films selected for major festivals, namely Passages [+see also:
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film profile] in Berlin. The Venice Film Festival sees him toplining Lubo [+see also:
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interview: Giorgio Diritti
interview: Valentina Bellè
film profile] by Italy’s Giorgio Diritti in the official competition, where he steps into the shoes of a nomadic street artist belonging to the Yenish community but naturalised as a Swiss citizen. The film opens in the years leading up to the Second World War. Lubo Reinhardt and his family are moving from one town to another with the aim of bringing a little joy to the locals when he’s called upon to enlist in the ranks of the Swiss army to defend the borders from a possible German invasion. While in uniform, he learns that his two children have been deported by the police and his wife killed because she opposed it. In 1939, the Street Kids Organisation was active in Switzerland, which sought to eradicate the phenomenon of nomadism under the pretext of carrying out humanitarian work for abandoned children. Nomadic children were taken from their families and either locked up in institutions or put up for adoption. For this reason, Lubo is desperate, he wants to free his little ones at all costs, as well as avenging his wife. An elderly Yenish woman offers him a tarot reading: “You will love her in all women and all women in her”: this is the cryptic phrase which holds his attention over the course of the film.
Lubo randomly meets a Jewish man from Vienna who is looking to bring money and jewels from a handful of families to Switzerland through mountain passes and who asks him for helps. Lubo immediately kills this man and steal his riches, meaning that he is now wealthy with an Austrian passport. In Zurich, he pretends to be a jeweller and uses his charm and elegant clothes and manners to get close to the wives of the notaries, bankers and directors of the institutes which are housing the children taken from their families: people who should be taking the time to train them and integrate them into society but who are actually doing everything they can to destroy their capacity to understand and want, losing themselves in new eugenics theories advocating sterilisation. Lubo might not succeed in getting his children back, but he definitely wages his vendetta, albeit subtly. Giorgio Diritti based his film on Mario Cavatore’s novel “Il seminatore” [The Inseminator] and the book’s title speaks for itself. Having unwittingly become some kind of irresistible seducer, Lubo develops a plan to inseminate as many Swiss women he can, as if offering a countermeasure to the Swiss government’s racial policy.
Lasting three hours and one minute, the film covers a period up until 1959 and is divided into three parts: the first part is tight but the second lingers too long on Lubo’s conquests, and the third sees the story lose all of its initial impetus. But the power of Diritti’s approach nevertheless remains, telling another story about abuse, as he did in The Man Who Will Come [+see also:
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interview: Giorgio Diritti
film profile], and bringing our attention back to the use of “eugenics theories”, which appeared in the early 1900s as the work of mostly English and French scholars with the aim of “improving humankind” by eliminating anyone deemed to be “a burden” on account of their physical characteristics, their origin or their way of life; theories which fuelled the birth and triumph of Nazism and which still have their followers in many regions of the world today. The relevance of Lobo resides in the continually unresolved and endlessly debated relationship between the wider community and difference.
Lubo is an Italian-Swiss co-production by Indiana Production, Aranciafilm with RAI Cinema, and Hugofilm Features and Proxima Milano. International sales are entrusted to True Colours.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 07/09/2023: Venice 2023 - Lubo
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© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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