A strange character wearing a fiery red raincoat wanders around the streets of Rome. This is Eleonora Danco, actress for Nanni Moretti, Marco Bellocchio, Cristina Comencini and Daniele Luchetti, and then writer-director with N-Capace [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] in 2015, and now with n-EGO, in competition at the Torino Film Festival. A stocking pulled down over her head to make herself unrecognisable like bank robbers and resemble De Chirico's metaphysical mannequins, and with a shoulder bag full of sleeping pills (the costumes are by Alessandro Lai), Eleonora walks along the wonderful streets of the historical centre, majestic Roman aqueducts, anonymous suburban squares, and down to the sea of ​​Terracina and Sperlonga – places familiar to her – to interview human beings.

Hundreds of hours of footage were patiently assembled by faithful editor Marco Tecce, together with images of the director filming herself lying on the asphalt, supine or face down, on her knees or legs in the air or while reading notes in which she lays bare her personal neuroses and fears, words peppered with massive doses of self-irony (“I always disgust myself, even this morning”). The stories told by the interviewees are intimate, at times paradoxical, that reflect the considerations of the filmmaker: dramatic romantic relationships, familial conflicts, failures and broken dreams, the anger of not being able to live decently, death, masturbation, denied motherhood. There’s the ex-hippie, the one who ruined himself with gambling, the young robber marked by the destiny of having had a robber father, the boy who lives “the rap scene” but who could be a priest, the woman who asked the surgeon to make her legs like those of her partner (the surgeon refused), the young woman symbolically tied to a pole, like Saint Sebastian, who has freed herself from her abusive husband; the one who grew up with five people in one room. On the contrary, the radical chic daughter of an ambassador, who has lived between Moscow, Washington, Mogadishu and Paris, or the one that moves between Maddalena Island and Cortina d'Ampezzo (“I love the reflection of the dawn on snow”). All are pieces of a mosaic of a fragmented society united in alienation – portraits and stories that would have pleased Pier Paolo Pasolini, the documentarian behind Love Meetings (and the writer-filmmaker is here cited in various forms).

But Danco poses her interviews, like Ulrich Seidl with his non-professional actors, makes them repeat their stories  several times when she’s not happy with the result, disconcerts them with her questions, and goes so far as mistreating a few of them (“my father takes possession of me, I become him”), and has them attacked by minor deities wrapped in golden cloaks (or first aid thermal blankets?). Danco finally distils all this bizarreness into a performance between the theatre of the absurd and a social experiment that must have convinced the Frenchman Jean Bréhat to enter into co-production, who with Rachid Bouchareb finances the films of the most extreme director of professional actors in Europe, Bruno Dumont. In n-EGO, in fact, there is no exploitation of the grotesque, but there is a passion and a sincerity, there is pure participation in the lives of these people and absolute faith in the power of representation. n-EGO is a merciless and mocking film that questions the viewer, challenges and rejects him. It could have done without that part of satire on the film industry that exploits the cameo of Filippo Timi in the role of the producer who quotes Shakespeare but does not give up a cent (“to access European funds you have to make a film about racism, wars or feminism”) or that of Elio Germano who pretends to be a taxi driver.

n-EGO is an Italian-French co-production by Nightswim and Tessalit Productions, in collaboration with RAI Cinema.