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ROME 2024

Review: Hey Joe

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- James Franco stars in Claudio Giovannesi's drama set in 1971 Naples, which offers beautiful lyrical moments but characters that aren’t studied in depth

Review: Hey Joe
Francesco Di Napoli and James Franco in Hey Joe

“I’ve done three wars. In Europe, Korea, Vietnam”. The character of Dean Barry played by James Franco in Claudio Giovannesi’s Hey Joe is the perfect veteran we’ve gotten to know through classical American cinema. Alcoholic, chronically depressed, separated from a wife he doesn’t manage to pay alimony to and who now wants to take over the house where he lives in New Jersey. We are in 1971. Waking him up from this PTSD numbness is a letter from the Red Cross, undelivered for years, informing him of the death of a woman in Italy. This woman has left behind a son called Enzo.

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Premiering in the Grand Public section of the Rome Film Fest, the film opens with images of occupying American soldiers wandering around the rubble and miseries of 1944 Naples, brought to its knees by bombings from the Allies. A long flashback informs us of the brief love story between soldier Dean Barry and the young Lucia. More than 25 years later, Dean is willing to sell his beloved 1966 Mustang to return to Naples’ Spanish Quarters and meet the son he didn’t know he had. The veteran finds a city that doesn’t seem to have recovered from the war. Helping him in his search for Enzo is sex worker Bambi (“Bambi is male”, he warns Dean), played by the great Giulia Ercolini, with whom Dean will form an ever deeper relationship. But the meeting with Enzo (the young Francesco Di Napoli) is painful. The young man is part of the local criminal community and grew up in the shadow of a stepfather, the ruthless don Vittorio (Aniello Arena). Dean tries everything to get first the trust, then the affection of his son, paying off his gambling debts, helping him in the smuggling of cigarettes and alcohol, even redeeming the young man's freedom with money, since it “belongs” to the mob boss. “I don’t have a choice, I have to, it’s my life” responds Enzo to his father who offers him to “start over together” in America.

Giovannesi offers beautiful lyrical moments, such as when Dean and Enzo show each other the wounds on their skin: the father’s are from the war, the son’s from the street. But perhaps there is no room for feelings. The romanticism of the veteran, illusory and self-saving, collides with the concrete pragmatism of the Neapolitan criminal, and the culture clash with the country that is losing the Vietnam war and consolidating the idea of consumerism is clear. It is a shame that the script, written by the director with Maurizio Braucci and Massimo Gaudioso, indulges in some simplifications and doesn’t manage to significantly deepen the characters, leaving the spectator with a feeling of irresolution that the consolatory ending doesn’t redeem. In this film inspired by a true story, or perhaps just by a legend told in the Spanish Quarters, the father-son relationship sums up the relationship between two cinemas. The anti-heros of 1970s New Hollywood created by Paul Schrader, John Schlesinger, Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese, F. F. Coppola, Oliver Stone and company, are distilled in James Franco’s dropout, and are confronted with Italian neorealism, The Skin by Curzio Malaparte adapted for the screen by Liliana Cavani and the socio-anthropological portraits of the Camorra that arrived later. Director of photography Daniele Ciprì accomplishes the miracle of guiding the chromatic transition and merging the reverberations and the tonality of these two cinematic traditions with intensity and expression.

Hey Joe was produced by Italian outfit Palomar with Rai Cinema in collaboration with Vision Distribution, Sky and Netflix. Vision handles foreign sales and will distribute the film in Italy from 28 November.

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(Translated from Italian)

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