CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
YET another dose of foreign film culture hits Gauteng this week with the Italian Film Festival at the Rosebank Mall in Johannesburg. Italian cinema has taken a bit of a dive since the halcyon days of master cineastes Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni and even Sergio Leone.
It appears things could now be changing for the better: for instance, Il Postino, although directed by Englishman Michael Radford, is the biggest grossing foreign language film ever. When the film was nominated for five Oscars the Italian media used saturation coverage to overcome the country’s supposed “anti-Italian nationalism”.
This very real sentiment was probably best expressed in a line from Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco’s anarchic-surreal comedy The Uncle From Brooklyn: “The entire Italian cinema production is ugly because actors are beautiful, enlightened, affected and unusable. Only American movie-makers have succeeded in giving us faces which make Mafiosi characters believable; our Mafiosi faces make you laugh.” Unfortunately this rude, liberating film won’t show at the fest but there’s still plenty to choose from.
It seems the best Italian films these days are the commercial ventures, comedies and lyrical melodramas (Senza Pelle is a fine example). The decline in classic “arty” Italian cinema is shown by the Taviani brothers’ latest picture Elective Affinities, which is playing at the festival. The film is slow, dreary and self- conscious and has little of the vision they expressed in previous masterworks like Kaos or Padre Padrone.
Two other one-time brilliant film-makers, both known for their caustic comic style, have new films showcased at the festival:
Dino Risi’s comic-drama Young and Nice Looking follows the fortunes of two scruffy lads who both fall for a gypsy girl after she feigns blindness and robs them of all their cash.
Lina Wertmuller returns after a long hiatus with On A Moonlight Night, a tale about a pair of newly-weds who wander around the world pretending to be HIV positive. No stranger to controversy, Wertmuller has been labelled reactionary by some and this latest effort is sure to be worth catching for her usual ironic and contentious point of view.