The family between creation and reality

Sometimes weird short circuits are totally unexpected. As I write, forgotten sounds can be heard from the balcony of the house, such as children swarming lively towards school chased by parents who struggle chasing them. Families resume their way of life and so we hope.
And I wanted to write about families at the cinema.

During the last Venice Film Festival, two different but similar works were shown, portraying presumed but also real, even if invented, families. An exchange of true, false and likely that a fraudulent tool like cinema, capable of being based on an illusion such as the fiction of the movement given by the flow of so many still images on the retina, knows how to handle.

Pierpaolo is a doctor married to Ludovica, an established director. Their son Federico is a graduate in philosophy tyrannized by a university baron who prefers any other student to him. Their stories intersect with those of Bruno, a primary friend of Pierpaolo, and his wife Gaia, as well as those of Claudio and Carlo, two brothers who run an armory and are part of a neo-fascist group. The picture is completed by the wives and children of Carlo and Claudio, and a sulphurous character who will remain (in fact) unnamed and who appears only at the beginning and at the end. This is the synopsis of Pietro Castellitto's first film as director / screenwriter, Predatori, appreciated in Venice and winner of a screenplay award. A work that is a generational and social encounter / clash between different families represented with a grotesque tone that refers to the best tradition of Italian comedy relentless in portraying Italic defects with cruel irony.

The director is in real life the son of the actor Sergio and this creates easy curiosity in imagining how much autobiographical is cast in the history of the film. A mix between true / false that does not happen in the documentary The Rossellinis that a "grandson of art" Alessandro dedicates to his grandfather Roberto, the tutelary deity of Italian cinema, creator of neorealism. A bulky man, both professionally and privately, who ended up affecting the existence of his descendants as well as those who had emotional ties with them. The arduous task that the director / grandson imposes on himself is to make everyone talk, starting with his father Renzo, about that grandfather who is so skilled in bringing humanity to the screen but less versatile in his availability towards those around him. Two different visions of such a primary and controversial social reality as the family.

Davide Bracco
NP October 2020