09/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The latest feature by Pupi Avati is a truly over-the-top noir gothic thriller, unsettling and ridiculous

It is rather difficult to draw a comprehensive summary of the latest film by Pupi Avati, titled American Backyard [+see also:
interview: Pupi Avati
film profile] and presented as the closing film of the 81st Venice Film Festival, out of competition. This is a bizarre cinematic experience, unsettling, at times horrid and ridiculous, set in the middle of the 1940s between Emilia Romagna and the town of Davenport, Iowa.

We are immediately introduced to the protagonist. This is a young psychopath and aspiring writer who carries with him an album of his dead parents (with whom he often converses), played by the promising Filippo Scotti. In the first scene, the young man finds himself at the barber’s and has a very brief conversation with a young nurse from the US Army, Barbara (Mildred Gustafsson). Their few seconds spent together are enough to give rise to an obsession in the protagonist towards the girl, who he is ready to call “the woman of [his] life”. A year later, by chance – or rather, by means of a significantly forced narrative turn – he finds himself living alone in the Midwest, in a house adjacent to the nurse’s own. The mother (Rita Tushingham) reveals that her daughter has mysteriously disappeared, after learning that she was going to marry an Italian man.

The young man thus goes on a surreal odyssey in search of the girl, hearing voices, digging in the garden of his elderly neighbour and looking to retrace the tracks of the girl in an erratic and all-encompassing way. His investigations – and some trespassing – soon take him back to Italy, where his efforts continue incessantly. The story proceeds at a brisk pace and like a continuous wandering. If, on the one hand, this choice can be fascinating in some ways, on the other hand, it makes everything seem rather forced and unjustified.

The plot, at least in the first part, manages to be engaging enough. However, the level of suspension of disbelief required subsequently starts climbing vertiginously, sometimes falling into the incomprehensible or into unintentional comedy. The scene set in the police station (where we see Andrea Roncato playing a marshal of the carabinieri intent on collecting a denunciation from the protagonist) is perhaps the clearest example of the gradual decline of the narrative scaffolding at the foundation of the film.

Shot entirely in black and white with sporadic inserts of archive material that indicate the main changes of time and place, the film in general suffers from a rather bare and uninspired mise en scène. The score by Stefano Arnaldi, although well realised and able to evoke noir cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, is at times too didactic. Moreover, the voice of the character of Arianna (Morena Gentile), obviously redubbed in English, clashes with the others in terms of authenticity. The finale, decidedly daring and enigmatic, only partially answers the questions raised previously.

American Backyard is a fully Italian production by DueA Film, Minerva Pictures and Rai Cinema. Minerva Pictures handles international sales.

(Translated from Italian)