08/11/2024 - Alberto Rizzi’s second film is an eccentric family drama inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, directed with surprising creativity

Family relations and the evils of the deep provinces are the key themes of Squali, the second feature by Verona filmmaker Alberto Rizzi (who made his debut in 2020 with Si muore solo da vivi), selected in Alice nella Città at the 2024 Rome Film Fest and now in Italian cinemas. Loosely based on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Squali starts from far away, cinematically speaking, namely from Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 debut Fists in the Pocket, the film-manifesto of a rebellious generation which represented a self-destructive family in a lifeless and respectable province of the North of Italy like an asphyxiating and poisonous microcosm ready to explode. The bond with Fists in the Pocket, to which there is an explicit reference in a scene from Rizzi’s film, seems to flow out to the more recent cinema of Carlo Mazzacurati and Alessandro Rossetto, who had ripped off the mask from the rich and business-minded Veneto, to then coagulate in something different still, between theatrical representations and experimental cinema, between realism and allegory, in a vortex of caustic and irreverent ingredients.

Four very different brothers and step-brothers, each with something eating away at their soul, gather in the old farmhouse of their widowed father, Leone (an unstoppable Mirko Artuso), on the pre-alpine plateau of the Lessinia, in the Verona province. Much like Dostoevsky’s Fyodor Pavlovich, Leone is a cruel and cunning man, manipulative and histrionic, possessive and paranoid. The older son Demetrio (Stefano Scherini) hates his father (the feeling is mutual) and is there because he is crumbling under a mountain of gambling debts and wants the money that the mother has left him before the loan sharks take him out. Ivan, athletic and obsessed with with his physique (Diego Facciotti, a stone-faced young actor), also despises Leone and is there reluctantly, only because his fiancée Flor (Dominican actress Astrict Lorenzo) has thrown him out of the house. The angelic Alessio (Gregorio Righetti) has abandoned the seminary at the local monastery to return to a youthful love, while the unflappable Sveva (Maria Canal), who’s always lived with her father, has only just learned she’s expecting a child, and feels like a prisoner in these walls and mountains. “The province isn’t a place, you have it in your head, it’s the stink you carry around with you”, Demetrio angrily confirms.

Already a theatre dramaturg and director, Rizzi (who also wrote the script) moves the boundaries of the filmic space, makes his actors express themselves ironically with cultured quotes (they hum the song of the Swiss guards that Louis-Ferdinand Céline places at the beginning of Journey to the End of the Night) and, at the same time, with crude contemporary language. The filmmaker directs with classical rigour and with surprising creativity, and the photography by Michele Brandstetter de Bellesini creates colours that are at times dreamlike, using elements of the landscape in a symbolic fashion: the fossil deposits in Bolca, with sharks from 50 million years ago (thus the title, which of course refers to human greed), or the majestic and disturbing Ponte di Veja. Between magical realism and the grotesque, Rizzi plays with local customs (the “trombones” feast in San Bartolomeo) and, most of all, he jokes with the saints, with the hypocritical and bigoted religious sentiment of the locals who materialise a flesh-and-bone saint (Chiara Mascalzoni) who cites Alejandro Jodorowski’s Santa Sangre. Personal and visionary, Squali has a sub-finale faithful to Dostoevsky’s novel, with a liberating parricide, and a crude and a moving finale of redemption and pacification.

Squali was produced by Magenta Film and will be in Italian cinemas from 12 November, distributed by Magenta Film.

(Translated from Italian)