The Road to Pordenone and return - Barrie Pattison's Roman Holiday

I felt I didn’t do justice to Rome on my fleeting last visit so I settled in for a few days more. Well the Colosseum’s no fun since they took the lions out and tourists are still ten deep round the Trevi Fountain. The Via Veneto is dull stuff in daylight - no wolfhounds, no movie stars, no paparazzi cameras shooting the cafe tables. The guys laying out the red carpet seemed bored. 

Cinecitta Movieworld Park is promoted on sides of buses again and Giuseppe Battison was doing his “Orson Welles Roast” at the Ambra Jovinelli  but I didn’t think my Italian was up to that. Porte Portese, once a ribbon of eccentric junk along the lines of London’s Portobello Road or Paris’ Marché Clignancourt, is now one giant discount store where you get cut price underwear and canned groceries. I felt sympathy for the one guy who was doing nice hand crafted olive wood cutlery. They had a few stalls offering DVDs there but these were all unused copies of the same hundred or so, mainly recent, titles.

In Italy you get new disks from book shops rather than electronics stores. La Feltrinelli, the largest source, was running seventy-percent-off sales. I was able to stock up on Elio Germani and Leonardo Pieraccioni. Albert Sordi seems to have a monopoly on old and Italian but there was a supply of vintage American material proudly proclaiming “Doppiaggio originale d’epoca” as if ancient dubbing was an asset. A small amount of the stock now runs to English sub-titles. Gabrele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) seems to insist that his material is issued with them which is handy as SBS looks like it is giving up there and Italian Film Festival retrospectives are short and brutal. The second hand market seems to have receded into porno though I did manage to find Mario Bava’s Roy Colt & Winchester Jack in the street stalls at Stazione Termini - once setting of the same

name Vittorio de Sica movie.

The Italian situation is healthier than some markets. The only DVD store I found in Abu Dhabi has obviously been closed for a year, it’s posters sun faded to dim black and white.

Rome TV still runs to a thousand channels though some are blank and the others seem to be divided between adfomercials and all night variety shows with Bunga Bunga girls in skimpy outfits. We do seem to have lost the station that was all stills of Padre Pio with solemn music. Pieraccione’s 2001 Il Principe e il pirata was being treated as an event and heavily trailered. All this is of course in Italian with the foreign (mainly US) material dubbed. I managed to get the one French language channel on which I was dependent for my knowledge of world events - go Gilets jaunes!

I couldn’t locate a Cinémathèque but Rome still has what we recognise as an IWERKS theatre, The Time Elevator doing forty five-minute tourist oriented movies. I saw their The History of Rome,an ambitious run through Romulus and Remus, Nero, Caligula, Michelangelo and Mussolini. Played in English (multiple choice headphones) it is an actors and digital buildings reconstruction with vibrating seats - and a simulation of rats running across your feet, introduced by a couple of foyer animatronics. I didn’t take down the credits and IMDB is silent on this one.

The city had made it to its 14th Rome Film Festival with a ten-day inventory including Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, Nicolas Boukhrief’s Trois Jours et Une Vie and Cristina Comencini’s Tonare and a documentary about the Cecchi Goris, along with a set of celebrity tributes, a nine film retrospective on Koreeda Hirokazu and a free fifteen title one on Max Ophuls. 

As far as traditional movies go, Il Messaggero listed 60 plus cinemas, of which nine claim to be Art Houses with a couple of them advertising Original Language versions. Odeon Space have multi-salas there, one of which offered twenty titles. I watched the new Claudio Bisio release Si mi vuoi bene in their Piazza del Republica Cinema Moderno (above) about which I was curious. The company’s Milan multiplex always strikes me as the most beautiful cinema building I’ve seen. This one wasn’t as stylish but obviously came from the same stable - floor to ceiling foyer mirror and panels outside the auditoria listing the format, sound system and image proportions. 

It still seems to be company policy to put a sales break in the middle of the feature, recalling the old days of single projectors and a ticket office sign lighting up Primo tempo - Interval - Secondo Tempo, an unwelcome anachronism in the days of digital projection. They halted in the middle of a song in the Bisio film. I was not impressed, particularly as their nine and half Euros seemed to be top price for a movie in Rome. Other exhibitors don’t seem to feel the need to gouge their customers in this way.

Se mi vuoi bene itself was a slick, sentimental comedy in the line of Bisio’s Benvenuti al sud/Nord.  Dissatisfied with his life, Claudio spots the store front Chiacchitere run by Sergio Rubini, where people are playing chess and nibbling fresh biscuits and Bisio has agame of table football with asociate Dino Abbrescia. After a night’s consideration hecomes back with a wall chart which shows how he plans to put right the lives of his family and friends (vision of characters divided by a gold lightning bolt) with schemeslike the car shunt that means his ex meets Abbrescia, claiming to be a a fan of Marqueswhose name he can’t pronounce, Claudio being the guide on a tourist bus that delivers a load of Japanese to his wife’s “Cera una tempo” book shop to push cameras in her face ortaking his lively blonde daughter on a day scaling tree walkways - nice cut to them surrounded by bubbles on the bench where she sat with him as a child.

These plots go wrong of course. His tennis playing dad is set up on a center court where the one-time champion has been told to make him look good but dad taunts the man who breaks the agreement and wipes him out. Bisio’s ladyfriend is furious and joins him in the Rage Room where she gets so stuck into smashing things that Claudio has to press the red button to have the manager take away the crow bar she is waving. The brother’s exhibition of his painting of National flags is a bust until (this is dumb) he whacks one over Bisio’s head and a visiting New York critic wants him to do it in an exhibition in the States. The wife gets to appreciate the extra business the Asians represent. 

Singer Luca Carboni replaces the Luca Carboni imitator in the night club where the disrupted couples are watching, with him calling them up to the microphone to create harmony. 

Good Turin production and strong cast. A few nice gags like Bisio registering shock by flinging the cat he is stroking across the room. The climax with Rubini is genuinely touching. Si mi vuoi bene is quite endearing and an attempt to break the comedy formulas even if it sometimes doesn’t work and is ultimately soft centred.

I also got to watch Rubini’s own new Il Grande Spirito, disappointing coming from a director whose career began with the accomplished 2000 Stazione and 2003 La Bionda.

Here Sergio plays a scruffy small time provincial hood involved in a gang war. His associates treat him dismissively after a stuff-up bank job where he shot a poodle – cellphone images and disjointed flashbacks. Sergio manages to get the hold-up loot away from them and plans taking off with Bianca Guaccero his beautician ex, who has had his calls barred on her cell ‘phone. However, he finds himself trapped in a roof top washhouse while the heavies & cops mill in the street below. 

He becomes dependent on maybe crazy Rocco Papaleo (Io & Marilyn) who thinks he's Black Deer, a Sioux Indian under the control of the Great Spirit. The local kids pull his pants down for a laugh providing a photo for the nephew to use as evidence that he needs to be institutionalised the way the developer wants.

Things work up to a climax where Rubini bullies Pappeleo into showing him his rat run through the roof tops and fire stairs to street level and drives off reprimanded by idiot savant Papeleo “Fiat haven’t made a decent car since the Ducato. You should have stolen a Volvo.” Sergio does the Big Sleep routine of phoning Guaccero who tells him she’s with his aunt when he can see her in the salon necking with the bandaged ear heavy on his trail.  

So so ‘scope images get some value out of the Taranto industrial sky line with the distant burn off chimney being associated with Indian ceremonial fires. The cast work at making their characters vivid and low wattage corruption is nicely caught but it really is too much to try and run this up into a two-hour movie.

I ended the trip with the same reaction as I had fifty years ago. The Rome film scene is still an anti-climax after Paris.