Italian Film Festival - Barrie Pattison recommends MI VUOI BENE (Fausto Brizzo, 2019), RITORNO A COCCIA DI MORTO (Antonio Albanese, 2020) and LACCI (Daniele Lucchetti, 2020) ..and harks back to COME UN GATTO IN TANGENZIALE (Antonio Albanese, 2017)

Seems everyone's involved in an unseemly race to get their post lock-up Film Festivals up before Xmas. The Italians are traditionally heavy hitters in this area - like the Spaniards and the Iranians. A few of their celebrities are represented  in the dozen plus new titles on offer - Nanni Moretti, Elio Germani, Danielle Luchetti, Pierfancisco Favino, Fabio Luigi, Stefano Accorsi - too many to do justice. On the other hand we can't help feeling they should try harder with retrospectives than offering Roberto Rossellini, whose work never did stand close scrutiny, and some familiar sixties diva vehicles.

I caught Fausto Brizzi' Si Mi Vuoi Bene in Rome a couple of years back. It was a slick, sentimental comedy in the line of Bisio’s Benvenuti al sud/Nord.  Dissatisfied with his life, bald lead Claudio Bisio spots the storefront Chiacchitere run by Sergio Rubini no less, where people are playing chess and nibbling fresh biscuits. After a night’s consideration, he comes back with a wall chart showing how he plans to put right the lives of his family and friends (vision of characters divided by a gold lightning bolt) setting up his ex wife with store help Dino Abbrescia, claiming to be a fan of Marquez whose name he can’t pronounce, Claudio being the guide on a tourist bus that delivers a load of Japanese to the wife’s “Cera una tempo” book shop to push cameras in her face or taking his lively blonde daughter on a day scaling tree walkway - 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. Turns out the champ is moonlighting with mum too. Bisio’s ladyfriend is outraged and joins him in the Rage Room where she gets so stuck into smashing things that Claudio has to press the red button to get the manager to take away the crowbar 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 US. The wife gets to appreciate the extra business the Asians represent. 

Good Turin production and strong cast. A few nice gags like Bisio registering shock by flinging the cat he is stroking accross 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.

Antonio Albanese - no not hat one  - the Italian actor, has been the lead in films by Gianni Amelio (Intrepido 2013) and Pupi Avati (La seconda notte di nozze 2005). Woody Allen made him the traffic cop in To Rome With Love and he’s directed his own movies. We have to regard him as an extension of the line of Italian comedy stars that runs through Toto, Sordi, Tognazzi, Celantano & Verdone. Fausto Brizzi 's 1917 Come un gatto intangenziale/Like a Cat on the Highway with Albanese was his country’s biggest earner for its year, so we hoped to find why this lightweight has proved so popular  but it it never rose above good natured. 

Albanese appeared heading up a big league Rome Think Tank when his teenage daughter Alice Maselli hit him up for twenty Euros and introduced her boy friend from slummy Bastoggi. Things don’t get any better when Antonio follows her bus there and heads off the car from which dark roots and glitter-lettered singleted Paola Bergamasco emerges with a baseball bat to do his wind shield. Passing the “Abandon Hope All Ye who Enter here” wall graffiti he comes to the menacing block of flats where he nervously approaches the top  apartment with the pop music bell push summoning Bergamasco, the boy friend’s mother. 

The film trades on contrasting the two lifestyles.  They get their value out of this with her taken aback by the wall of painted nudes in his tasteful flat and a Bastoggi visit in the company of the daughter's nervous lavender growing mother. He goes on the beach outing to crowded Coccia di Morto (like the Coney Island scene in Devil and Miss Jones) and in return takes them trekking across the fields to the spacious society retreat with the gourmet buffet. We get the arrival of the boy’s slobby dad Luca Amendola with the foil & bleach hair who parts the beach crowd but gets taken away by the cops, or the compulsive shopping twin stepsisters who speak in unison, Alesandra & Guidesaa & Valentina Guidesaa, named Pamela and Sue Ellen after the characters in Dallas.

Off course Albanese's kiss rocks Paola's world and in the end he goes off script and tells his Think Tank that they don’t understand common people like the Coccia di Morto lot. 

That one was quite well made but it traded in the charm of the cast rather than clever gags or strong plotting.

Cast photo, Ritorno a Coccia di Morto

The follow up to Come un gatto in tangenziale - Ritorno a Coccia di Morto  is in this year’s event.  We now get get strident Cortellesi in the nick after the cops found the stolen loot that the twins hid in Paola's flat after their shoplifting outings. Fellow inmates in the domesticated cell tell her to call on “Il Ministro” her influential friend. He’s involved in group selection of the color scheme for the cultural museum he’s setting up but snaps  onto the job, having her transfered to a Catholic institution outside Rome where her nun supervisor keeps popping on organ notes and the aged priest in charge has been replaced by a younger more gung ho cleric expected back from retreat at any minute.

She finds her bed was previously occupied by the fierce looking mother superior who died in it at 103 - the day before. That one figures in Cortellesi’s black and white nightmares.

When the husband of the abused wife sheltered there starts shouting threats Paola headbuts him to the applause of the inmates and nuns. But Paola doesn't fit in all that well when her Milanese community kitchen speciality contains pork that the Muslim parishoners can't eat.

The Rev. Luca Argentero proves to be a better Communist than politician Albanese having tables cleared away after his service to set up the free meal kitchen for the poor. Antonio takes Paola on a cultural tour - the Prosepina statue, a view of the Vatican and their gumboot underground expedition which comes out behind the Trevi fountain. This is nice.

They get back, breaking Paola’s midnight curfew to find father Argentero more concerned with his squatters whose power has been cut off (to the delight of the neighbors). It’s Paola who knows how to rewire the broken connection without breaking the seal, which would be illegal. The cops think she's a passing transvestite looking at the murky security footage. That doesn't go down too well. 

Unfortunately her intervention shuts down all the lights of Rome and the ice sculpture in Antonio's Museum melts leaving a steel  fishbone shape and the floor awash. The comparison between the not unimpressive museum exhibits and the Public Space where they do games, ballet and movies is the smartest thing in this rather blunt satire. When Padre Argentero’s kitchens are condemned by the public health, Paola has him set up there solving that problem rather simplistically.

Back at Cortellesi’s flat the twins rented the rooms to Indian immigrants further impeding Albanese and Cortelesi’s romance. The pair plan on surprising the kids but they have a surprise of their own.

There's nice use of the width of the ‘scope screen. The film passes the time.

Luigi Lo Cascio (centre), Alba Rhrwacher (r), Lacci

It seems hard to believe that I’ve been on Daniele Luchetti’s case for more than thirty years - since I checked out an unknown film from Cannes at the Paris Cinémathèque, that turned out to be the unexpected, likeable Domani accadrà. 

Everything of his I’ve seen has proved to be complex and rewarding but for a lot of his new Lacci, it seemed that Luchetti’s work had plunged into gloom - infidelity, a suicide attempt, people bound together by ties that make them miserable and impact  their children - but if you wait it out the same distanced comic view of life does surface in an even more perverse form than we are used to, one that brings the rest of the film - and real life - into focus.

Alba Rohrwacher and Luigi Lo Casio (great cast in top form here) are raising a young family as he works as a Radio literature commentator in Rome, backed by sound effects men whose antics delight his children. They seem to be absolutely happy as the family join in a dance session and run through the streets in Halloween costume together. 

However out of the blue Lo Casio tells his wife of eight years he’s sleeping with another woman. She turns him out of the house - shot of him pausing downstairs by the car, which we will see again as a locating point in the film’s convoluted time structure.

Understandably he’s on with the delicious Linda Caridi, who his pre-teen daughter secretly adores. There’s a scene of him photographing her naked which proves to be one of the apparently irrelevant incidents that shape the narrative - naming the family cat, the trick unlocking mechanism for the gift box from Poland or the odd way he ties his lacci, shoelaces.

These eventually carry more weight than Rohrwacher’s leap from the second story window from which she’s thrown the radio broadcasting his program or his failure to either create a new family free of ties or sustain the old one.

Flash ahead twenty years and the characters have grown into Laura Morante and grey bearded Luchetti regular Silvio Orlandi who has perfected his serious comic persona. They bicker about his overpaying for Morante’s back massager and suspect the delivery girl of the break-in that las left the flat ransacked and its lifetime of  accumulation in chaos. Orlandi is particularly disturbed over the missing Polish box.

Unexpectedly we pick up with the grown children - and the cat - trying to figure out their lives. Grown daughter Giovanna Mezzogiorno vents. I’ve been on before about the frequency of  the word “vergogna” in Italian films and here we get a major film that pivots on it. It’s introduction into the final dialogues provides the weight to what we have already seen. Mezzogiorno dismisses her mother’s battle to achieve the thing she didn’t really want and her father’s life’s time archiving his insignificant work but the film’s tone is finally not bitter but one of ironic sympathy with characters unable to undo their mistakes, which their children inherit.

The performances dominate though they are showcased by Luchetti’s master craft and his non-judgmental world view. The film seems visually unremarkable but there is control to make the return to familiar images, the single shot of the wheel chair or the glimpses of Rome or Lazio register. Lacci is the director’s most complex and ambitious film, a snap back into his heavy hitter status, a more implacable version of his Anni felice, after the lightweight Momenti di Trascurabile Felicita.