02/09/2010

The film that made only Pupi Avati cry: beyond the irony (the Bologna-born director reproached the Mostra selectors for having chosen it instead of his Una Sconfinata Giovinezza), La Pecora Nera [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“The Black Sheep”) is everything but an easy tear-jerker. And yet the film, written (in collaboration with Ugo Chiti and Wilma Labate), directed by and starring Ascanio Celestini (who previously made a stage play version), seems to have all it takes to move audiences.

It is set in a mental asylum, where “electroshock therapy is like the whack you give to the record player” when it gets stuck. Nicola learns this when he is a child, in the “fabulous 1960s”, seeing his mother lying in bed, reduced to a shadow of a human being, shortly before she is subjected to a new, revolutionary “treatment”. Nicola, who has been brought up by his grandmother, doesn’t know that he too will soon end up in those corridors, among those electric shocks: but will it be for work reasons, or as a patient?

Seeing him accompany a “madman” (Giorgio Tirabassi) to the supermarket, we’d think he was a social worker. Among the shelves one day, he also bumps into an old flame (Maya Sansa, whom it’s great to see in such a cheery role), the first little girl to have driven him wild, in the vestry of the parish church.

But why does this madman speak the same words as Nicola and have the same memories? Viewers won’t take long to find out, with the help of Celestini speaking in voice-off throughout the film, singing out to the point of achieving a musicality that transcends the very meaning of the words: this has always been the stylistic hallmark of this “total narrator’s” performance, but on screen it risks sounding redundant, and stifling the images. The latter, on the other hand, are unusually powerful for a debut film (or almost debut, after his documentary Sacred Words), especially in the always terse portrayal of Nicola’s family microcosm, and in a few bursts of real poetry (the encounter with the “Martian” prostitute).

Produced by Alessandra Acciai, Carlo Macchitella and Giorgio Magliulo for Madelaine, and distributed by BIM (who for the first time in years have broken the Medusa-01 duopoly of the Venice Competition), the film will hit Italian theatres on October 15. International sales are being handled by Beta Cinema.

(Translated from Italian)