Extreme, radical, provocative, cynical. Everything can be said about Franco Maresco’s cinema, except that it goes unnoticed. Special jury prize (presided by Lucrecia Martel) in 2019 for The Mafia is No Longer What It Used to Be [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film], the Sicilian director returns in competition at the Venice Film Festival with Bravo Bene! [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film]. The play on words of the title is dedicated to the radical nihilist, “Nothingness apologist” Carmelo Bene, the actor, director and dramaturge (amongst the founders of the “new Italian theatre”) who passed away in 2002. Bene’s destabilising spirit hovers over the entirety of Maresco’s film, in which he imagines that the shooting of a film about Carmelo Bene gets interrupted by producer Andrea Occhipinti (the real producer of the film), exasperated by the ongoing delays, accidents on set and the hundreds of repeated claps that have consumed kilometers of very expensive film (of course, Maresco wanted to absolutely avoid digital shooting). But for the director, “if you already know when it will end, you’re taking everything for granted”. Accusing the production of “filmicide” and “rape”, the director leaves the set and disappears into thin air.

Thus we see co-writer Umberto Cantone (who co-wrote the film with Maresco's faithful scriptwriter Claudia Izzo) set out on the trail of the eclipsed director, driven around by Maresco's trusty taxi driver, a devoted believer who prays continuously while driving and doesn’t spill the beans about the filmmaker's whereabouts until the last moment. We therefore have several narrative strands that overlap, intersect, travel in parallel, or collide with explosive effects. The film shoot mixes up with the shoot of these scenes themselves, auditions in which Maresco insults his actors, fragments of the repertoire in which the career of the director gets reconstructed, from the times of ‘Cinito Tv’ with Daniele Ciprì, to the “cursed” films: Totò who lives twice, set in a monstrous and apocalyptic Palermo full of grotesque and blasphemous characters, was blocked by Italian censors for “contempt towards the religious sentiment”. 

In Bravo Bene!, the anti-hero is a saint, Giuseppe da Copertino, accompanied by a small donkey named Carmelo, an “idiot” saint à la Dreyer played by an aphasic actor. In the scene in which the saint must levitate and rise up to the sky, the crane breaks and the actor falls. Everything stops. We don’t know how true this is to the real production story but it isn’t so important, because we laugh, we smile bitterly and we think (if perhaps negatively). Maresco’s dark nihilism meets the breakdown of identity, meaning, dialogue and structure in the work of Carmelo Bene. Disassembled texts, desecrated words, language reduced to an ensemble of signifiers without direction. Maresco cites Bene: cinema doesn’t exist, it is only a double for itself.

But Maresco stages above all his personal obsessions (a “psychiatrist” certifies his anankastic rituals, the spasmodic collection of useless objects), retraces his cinema and - like Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now destroyed by a hurricane - records the material impossibility of “making” a film. The other producer, Marco Alessi, suspects that he has deceived them all from the beginning and that this is a “Samson dies with the Philistines”. A suicide film, an anti-testament to leave to posterity. Beyond his pessimistic vision of existence à la Schopenhauer, what remains is the infinite love he has for his actors, taken from the streets, outcast comedians, emblematic faces of Sicilian subculture that make up a grotesque, authentic and often surreal portrait of the social fabric put on screen by Maresco’s genius. “The only way to give shape to the anger and horror I feel towards this shitty world.”

Bravo Bene! was produced by Lucky Red and Dugong Films with Eolo Films Productions. True Colours handles international sales.