New Italian Cinema Series Reflects Italy Today

By Rod Armstrong

An invigorating crop of new work will be on view when the San Francisco Film Society presents the 11th annual New Italian Cinema series, November 11–18 at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas. This year’s lineup is bookended by two diverse films from female directors.

On Opening Night, Francesca Comencini will present her vision of Milan as the capital of a morally bankrupt nation in Our Country, starring Valeria Golino. It doesn’t get more contemporary Italian than this film, which, despite a favorable critical reception, caused audible resentment among some at its world premiere at the Rome Film Festival a year ago. The discomfort was prompted, suggested Paolo Mereghetti, the film critic for the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, by “the perplexity of seeing a film that’s out of place in the Italian panorama, far from the facile, flowery and allegorical folklore that seems to be the only language accepted in the cinema and in television, where everything is excessively spelled out, excessively shown off, excessively forced.”

“After a diet of lighthearted comedies poking fun at the national character,” wrote Elisabetta Povoledo in the New York Times, “Italians are not used to having their dark side laid bare.”
This new film is only the latest effort keeping the director in the headlines. Comencini comes from a prominent show business family which includes her father Luigi, a veteran director who passed away earlier this year, and sister Cristina, who directed the powerful Don’t Tell, a 2005 nominee for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

Comencini burst on the scene in the early 1980s. Barely into her 20s, Comencini quit school, moved to France, got married (to producer/actor Daniel Toscan de Plantier) and directed her first feature, Pianoforte, a story of drug addiction, which won the coveted De Sica prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Two decades and ten films later, Our Country presents a variety of interconnecting stories involving financial shenanigans, illegal adoptions and wrongheaded choices made for material gains. Though money—the lack of it, the need for more—is central, the theme of childlessness also plays a major part. It’s a bold and complex film which powerfully sets the stage for our presentation of two prior films from the same director.

From 2004, I Like to Work (Mobbing) offers an equally dire but more intimate look at Italian society in crisis. It tells the story of a woman with a difficult home life whose job becomes increasingly difficult when her coworkers gang up on her. Presenting a form of office harassment all too common in Italy, Comencini offers a vital social document told in powerful narrative form.
Her 2002 film My Father’s Words focuses more on interpersonal relationships than societal ills in its story of a spoiled young man torn between two sisters. Using Italo Svevo’s popular novel Zeno’s Conscience as a starting point, Comencini makes indelible points about romantic attachments and family ties.

After this mini-retrospective, New Italian Cinema presents seven features and shorts by emerging directors who are all working confidently in a variety of genres to tell their stories. Any Reason Not to Marry delightfully employs the tropes of romantic comedies to satirize politics, religion and marriage. The Ball works within a coming-of-age framework to tell the story of a single parent balancing career and motherhood. With Italian Dream, director Sandro Baldoni manages a nifty balance of mystery and suspense. Even more suspenseful is Me, the Other a shipboard-set drama about suspicion between friends in a post-9/11 world.

One Out of Two marks director Eugenio Cappuccio’s return to the festival. His 2005 film I Truly Respect You was a clever tale of workplace downsizing; his latest is about a cocky lawyer whose life is transformed after being hospitalized for a potentially fatal illness. Salt Air is an assured first feature involving a complex father-son relationship. And Shelter is a powerful story of two women whose relationship is put to the test when they take a Tunisian boy into their home.

New Italian Cinema closes with Francesca Archibugi’s moving and multilayered Flying Lessons. Two teenagers from Rome decide to travel to India in the hopes of finding some direction for their lives. After some serious culture shock, including illness and robbery, they meet up with an Italian aid worker and work with her in a remote village. Without resorting to cliché or easy resolutions, Archibugi offers a finely tuned tale of late adolescence and newly acquired wisdom.

Regular New Italian Cinema attendees will remember the tribute to Archibugi from 2003 which included The Tree of Pears, a sensitive story of children dealing with a drug-addicted mother, and Tomorrow, an ensemble drama about relationships formed among survivors of the 1997 Umbria earthquake.