10/11/2011

A very rare thing in today’s cinema landscape, a funny, intelligent, non-vulgar comedy comes out in cinemas on November 11 in 20 copies, distributed by Cinecittà Luce. It is I primi della lista [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by emerging filmmaker Roan Johnson (Italian mother and London-born father to whom he owes his name), true story which took place in June 1970 in Pisa, when two secondary school students engaged in the student movement and a young lefty singer-songwriter decide to escape the country at the news of an imminent coup d’etat.

It’s a hot period in Italian history; December 1969 saw the massacre of piazza Fontana in Milan and in December '70 there is a real attempt at a coup by Junio Valerio Borghese. These were the times in which for political militants, for those who feel they are "first in line", it is not unusual to spend one or two nights out of the house. You never know.

Convinced by a phone call from a friend who gives him the alarm, singer-songwriter Pino Masi (an involved Claudio Santamaria) decides to take shelter in Yugoslavia and involves two students in the escape, Renzo Lulli (Francesco Turbanti, LARA Award special mention at the Rome Film Festival) and Fabio Gismondi (Paolo Cioni). More than revolutionaries they seem like a paranoiac and a useless pair. In view of the difficulties at the Yugoslavian border they turn to the Austrian border, which they cross escaping the Italian police, but not the Austrian, whom they ask to be taken in as “political refugees”, probably the first in history.

Sprinkled with gags and funny situations, such as the encounter at a motorway service station with a military platoon which is travelling down to Rome for the June 2 party and who convince the fugitives that D-day is approaching, the film maintains a light tone throughout at the same time as it lets the country’s real rising social tension hover over it, a tension which will lead to clashes in squares and terrorism. No didactic representations of the 70s, no direct reference to the present but certainly a reference to something which concerns all of us today.

The film, screened as a special event at the Rome Film Festival, was produced by Carlo Degli Esposti (Palomar), who boasts very successful TV series such as those about Police Chief Montalbano, Gino Bartali, judge Giovanni Falcone, Giorgio Perlasca. Degli Esposti knows that period well, having at the time been a militant of ‘Lotta Continua’, one of Italy’s main left extra-parliamentary groups. The most intelligent thing he could do in order to avoid nostalgia and hagiographical approaches, was to take a funny story and put it in the hands of young film novices: this film will be able to entertain young people who do not even have a clue what a coup is and draw the curiosity of those who lived through those years, whether as observers or "first on the list".

(Translated from Italian)