Summer 1998. A friend and I were driving past the Beverly Wilshire when he started. ‘Look, there’s Sean Penn!’ I turned to see. Slouched on bench behind red sunglasses, wearing white sweat socks and comfy slippers, he was casually fiddling with a baseball bat. But it definitely wasn’t Sean Penn—nor was the curly-haired guy sitting next, for that matter, whom I realised only later was director David Fincher. My friend was obviously more knowledgeable about NBA players than actors, and I was just the opposite, though on one thing he was right—the semi-pyjamaed demigod lounging there, probably waiting for his driver, was the actor from Seven Years in Tibet. At Ale’s command, I snapped a cheap paparazzi photo with our disposable Kodak camera and that was it—one more for the album of our crazy time at UCLA.
A few days after the surreal encounter we were wandering around Downtown as we stumbled upon a film set. Not an unusual sight in LA, except this was clearly bigger than the average we had seen around, so we got closer and approached a guy with enough communication devices on his body to seem a reliable source of information. Between a walkie-talkie buzz and another he was kind enough to reply, even caring to embellish the title with an article—The Fight Club. At that point, I had no idea that such a film was in the works, but when I eventually saw it about a year later, something struck me indelibly—the fragments of practical filmmaking I had hardly glimpsed on the streets against what the art of cinema had made of it.

I must have had an almond stuck in my rectum when I saw it first upon release, especially thinking that apart from some stylistic affectations that I still find unnecessary—the excessive glow against the digital feel of its crystal b/w or the fake cigarette burns, for instance—what had put me off then is just what enthralled me more at this round.
As much as gossip is always more interesting than facts, if Mank deserves any attention, it’s not for having lent an ear to it—perhaps rewriting history a touch too aggressively here and there—but for having dwelt on the adventurous lives that fed material and intentions of one of the most debated masterpieces in American cinema.
Hollywood at its glorious best, according to Fincher’s intriguing rendition, is an unfinished place populated by neurotic individuals who are not proud of what they do, hate their work, the friendships they maintain, and ultimately themselves. But it’s also a stage within another where true selves are vacant but for the echo of their unspoken torments in their virtuosic dialogues. A ruthless producer, an almighty entrepreneur, an arrogant genius, a disillusioned screenwriter and pantomime drunkard, and an only apparently airheaded blonde—Mank is a tragicomic carousel of magnificently cast and interpreted roles, dextrously spun by feverishly inspired pages that, to my partial defense, do require a few iterations to be appreciated in all their depth and clever writing. Never too late to reconsider a film.

‘You don’t wanta make any promises you don’t wanta keep,’ says Mr. Bernstein. ‘These’ll be kept.’ Kane finishes to read aloud a declaration of principles making himself an audience, more so than the close collaborators in the room or the people who are going to read it on the front page of his newspaper the following morning. Then he signs it, whispering his full name like a kid would do—the one he was—acknowledging to have done something true after a long time. His candid stare hesitates on those little dark symbols neatly put one next to the other not just to affirm, this is who I want to be, but rather to challenge himself and prove that that is who he really his. Sottovoce, Charles Foster Kane.
I could be completely overwhelmed by the beauty of this moment only because I know the full journey Kane will be going through, and what Rosebud means. Even the famous rage scene has now taken a completely different shape. Not the frustration of a man who’s accustomed to considering himself almighty, let alone that of a husband who’s been abandoned by his wife, but rather that of someone who has let his own self down just like others once did. And failed to be better. We spend half of our lives fighting against what we secretly fear we are, trying to be what we hoped the child we were would have become. In that tragic instant where we can’t hide anymore from admitting that that person was never to exist, that’s to me where Citizen Kane is. And once again, my heart sinks.

More years ago than a human mind could remember or a decent man dare to admit, I bumped into a featurette of the then-upcoming The Lion King—it was on the VHS of Cinderella, videotape times. Despite its understandably commercial nature, it had some sort of a eureka effect on me—Ha! so this is how animated films are made. Among the artists interviewed, there was this handsome man with Fred Mercury moustache and German accent who beautifully described how he had tried to infuse suaveness and ferocity into the same character or something down the line. It wasn’t what he said that impressed me, but how he moved, how he gestured, how he modulated the tone of his voice while talking about the creation of the Machiavellian Scar. The secret bond between animator and character—that is what he was making me aware of for the first time, and that is still what mostly attracts me to animation.
Skip forward to the present day, I am lucky enough to have been extended an invitation to a screening of the long-gestated directorial debut of Andreas Deja. Mushka may not be flawless, but it’s an act of love that couldn’t be truer to its author. Watching it in the company of old friends, fellow animators, and then having the pleasure to meet and chat with Andreas, threw me back to a particularly exciting moment in my life, the memory of which had gone neglected for a very long time.

To give up the burden of modern society and live a life of solitude in a remote part of the world is certainly an extreme choice, but who—as an artist especially—has never toyed with the idea, and perhaps thought that someone crazy or brave enough could actually do it? Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence always comes to mind as more of a realistic if thin possibility than a whimsical fantasy. That’s where the ambiguity of Liza lies for me. Whereas in other films by Marco Ferreri the surreal element makes itself apparent pretty soon in the story—like in La Grande Bouffe, Dillinger è morto, L’udienza, or La donna scimmia, where hints to the forthcoming descent into the allegorical, the preposterous, the paradoxical are progressively left on the path—Liza starts from an uncommon yet plausible scenario to abruptly switch to big time bananas. Just as we are becoming intrigued by the romantic tale of two outcasts on a desert island and are naturally invited to project our expectations as to how things will evolve, we are plunged into an unfathomable parable of biblical misogynistic proportions where all the rules thus far established and, to an extent, everything we think we know about the characters is upended. But while our first reaction to seeing our bearded hero turn into an arsehole and our frail princess perform canine extravaganzas might put us off, a far deeper emotional process has just been triggered. And wherever that will lead us, it will be some place we might have never visited hadn’t we been teased by Marco Ferreri’s cheeky intuitions. Despite its clunky narrative, its cynical look at humanity—and having messed up Flaiano’s source material—Liza is as clever and challenging as cinema used to be.

I am not sure when was the last time I had become aware of an audience not only rejecting what they were seeing—which they normally receive quietly, for either lethargy or respect—but also making their dissent understood like in the old ballistic days of rotten eggs and tomatoes. If a few viewers giving up on Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All in a full house of three hundred seats and a film on a relatively disturbing subject hadn’t quite prompted that consideration, they did in the much smaller context of a random midweek show at the Crouch End Arthouse, populated by hardly a dozen desperate souls. Thinking of it in retrospect, L’immensità is not so unbearable to make people flee, but it does put to the test the most committed filmgoers’ stamina.
Whereas a storyteller rummaging into his past is traditionally a good premise—in cinema as in any of the arts—Emanuele Crialese struggles to find his way through the same maze of intimate recollections that other directors have been able to articulate or make somehow attractive. The exploratory spirit of the artist looking for his own self in fragments of dreams and memories is the main absence. The narrative is tangent to many intriguing characters, stories, themes, without ever daring into the depths of any. The scenes inspired by Raffaella Carrà and Adriano Celentano are per se as brilliant as the sparse intuitions L’immensità is paced by, but so poorly grounded to ultimately come through just as lyrical indulgences. Even the Seventies are depicted in a rather superficial way, mostly relying on ochre and amber tones, some beautiful garments, and a couple of cars of the time scattered around a derelict city of concrete. None of this is necessarily bad, it just feels tentative and slightly disjointed like everything else in the film. I always thought I didn’t mind a film that doesn’t seem to know which way to go. And yet, sometimes, it turns out I do.

It was a joy to see Marco Bellocchio’s Rapito screening to a full house, even up against a night that looked again like summer after a couple of questionable weeks. I was just filled with melancholy when I acknowledged—as I stood up and watched the end credits from the side aisle, embracing what seemed to me a charmingly civilised if old-fashioned local costume—that I was by a decade or two the youngest in the room. Ironically enough—though I hope, without concealing my horror, that this is not the shape film-going is taking—it felt like going out of church after service. You know, that sort of dignified silence, the polite giving way, and those awkward, compassionate, even contrite hints of smiles that are exchanged when eyes accidentally meet.
Rapito begins as a rather anaemic melodrama about an unbelievably true historical fact. Neither the writing nor the directing seems at first to exceed the average television drama virtues, but as the story moves into court the film starts to breach into its inscrutable figures—their contradictions, those of the time, those of our own culture—getting to a more and more convincing place through a crescendo of flashes of visual lyricism and dramatic vigour. Remarkable is the scene in which the freshly ordained Mortara abruptly goes berserk during the funeral procession of Pio IX and joins an indignant crowd who is threatening to throw the pope’s coffin into the Tiber. Or the one where his dad lets out his desperation in an emptied court, screaming and crying and punching himself on the head, with overwhelming human truthfulness. And it’s almost sickening the tragic intimacy Mortara takes advantage of in a seeming sort of trance to attempt at giving to her dying mother a Catholic baptism.
To an unlikely parallelism I could only discern in retrospect, this is the second film I’ve seen in a row after Tony Kaye’s American History X that revolves around such timeless themes as faith, family, identity, and—ominously echoing the current times—the almighty power of obtuse thinking, its control over the mind of others. Those made mouldable by innocence or ignorance.

It’s very late. My cousin says, ‘Choose a film to fall asleep on the couch.’ I am exhausted, I am sure it won’t be a problem to find a soporific element in whatever will be put in from of my eyes. But when I start browsing Mubi’s library in search for our title, and hope, I spot Dogman and I realise we actually have a chance to see a film and stay awake all through.
As the end credits roll, we slowly regain awareness of each other’s presence while our gaze is still locked on the screen. We are unable to move or blink or speak. No legal dosage of any substance would have given us the same effect, the exact same immobilising experience of my first watch, when I recorded my fresh reactions as follows.

I leave the theatre shaken. I sink hunched and uncomfortable into a velvet armchair at the bar of the Curzon Soho. It is not a prosaic lyricism. I am truly disturbed. I wonder if it shows, ambiguously at ease with the idea it could be so. A gentleman in tweed takes a seat at my table and orders a glass of whisky. I could ask him, but I leave him to a book he’s just extracted with no intent from his bag and the envied solitude of the shortsighted. Maybe it’s the turmoil of my recent state of mind, maybe I’ve got too much caffeine in my blood, or not enough sugar. In fact, I’m hungry. Dogman punched me in a way that cinema rarely has. What to do, stay here for a while, lick my wounds, wash them with the disinfectant that burns the most.

Five years on, watching it with fragmented yet vivid memories, I am immediately enthralled by how Matteo Garrone manages to pin his audience to the seat from the very first shot. Dogman’s opening scene is, in fact, a statement. Its unnerving ambiguity resolves into a sweet moment between man and animal, but the message is delivered—stay assured, there will be blood. As soon as Simone is introduced our fate becomes clear, and is nonetheless frightening. Edoardo Pesce is even more impressive in his role as an uncontrollable thug than Marcello Fonte is in delivering the complexity of his—a dog lover, a coward, a caring father, a criminal?
If the mise en scène of the film strikes as being so distinctive, much credit must be given to the incredible filming locations. The no-place and no-time that frames so sharply the narrative, its almost surreal sense of dystopian misery, only makes the psychological tension more palpable, violent, even toxic.
Among the metaphoric hints nested within the suffocating cascade of events, I am always fascinated by the scene in the picturesque workshop where Marcello gets the coke. There is a particularly disturbing obtuseness in Simone’s brutality as he bursts into the beautiful space, but also an uncomfortable meaning behind the masks the dealers craft as skilled artisans.
Along with those of Gomorra and L’imbalsamatore, these are the worlds and tones and creatures Matteo Garrone is a master in telling us about.

Tight angles on an animal and a female body are paced with the solemn gravity of a requiem by a unison of cellos and double basses. Brasses chime in setting a cadenced crosstalk of scarlet reds and pitch blacks. Is it a brutal killing, we might find ourselves thinking, or an avant-guard show. The circus.
Only minutes earlier, it was the gloomy end of a day that winter seemed to have claimed back after a delusive stint of spring. I had switched off too late to catch a film I desperately wanted to see, but I still needed to cleanse. Having domestic arrangements already been made to allow one of my recursive cinephile escapades, I bought a ticket for another film that wasn’t really on my list. So there I was, with a cup of coffee in my hands whose impossible temperature wasn’t showing any sign of dropping by the fraction of a degree and my heart sank into the abyss of one of the most fascinating films I have seen this year.
A few months after his debut feature was released, a young and unknown Jerzy Skolimowski got a phone call from Paris. To his complete disbelief Cahiers du cinéma wanted to interview him, why me? Despite having hardly been screened outside of Poland, Walkover had made it into their year top ten. The second place. Skolimowski froze for a good ten seconds, perhaps more, then he said, ‘And who is in the first place?’ It was Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar. Not having been able to see it yet, he asked if they could wait a couple days so he could go and watch it. To this day the experience is vivid in his mind. At some point during the film, the somehow cynical stance of the fresh filmmaker eager to learn the craft dissolved and by the excruciating epilogue, the beautiful scene where Balthazar dies in a mountain pasture surrounded by a flock of sheep, he was in tears. The first and only time in his life he really cried for a film. When a few years ago he and his co-writer, producer, and other half Ewa Piaskowska made with 11 Minutes their first attempt at a different way to break the received cinematic narrative, they knew they hadn’t quite succeeded. So as they felt the urge to continue the exploration, the memory of the effect that Bresson’s provocative masterpiece had had resurfaced, seemingly offering the right place to start all over.
Although their research in the equidae literature reached as far as Ovid and Apuleius to find a voice that wasn’t just an echo of Bresson’s, the comparison with Balthazar not only feels natural, it leads to a deeper appreciation of the work done on its Polish heir. As a donkey, the former does donkey things. He might have a vague cognition of the human world, but he is essentially an innocent observer. Much of the empathic connection with the audience comes right from its inability to understand our nonsensical torments. A different creature altogether, Eo is a couple of Darwinian steps ahead to say the least. Ambiguously courting a vague sense of parody, very soon in the film we see him cry or watch melancholically a herd of horses running free in the prairie. Later on, he will perceive the meanness of man and even revolt, seek revenge, make friends. Whereas Bresson’s donkey is some sort of a furry Virgil who takes us through the deep circles of our nature embodying the same elliptical attitude of its auteur’s cinematographic language, Skolimowski uses Eo to make a series of clear statements on the aberrations of our times. But there’s a more profound difference. Bresson’s models are sheer fascinating mysteries in the way they behave and the decisions they make. Skolimowski instead, judgmentally visit themes that are as valid as obvious, and he does writing characters who ultimately struggle to reach any of the complexity they seem to strive for. Hooligans, priests, and torturers. Eo is populated by a parade of foil figures whose inherent explicitness adds hardly anything to the established debate on the respective matters.
And yet, despite its latently weak foundations Eo develops a surprisingly solid structure and a shape of its own that gets frame after frame more convincing, more personal, more exhilarating. Bresson’s near documentary visuals couldn’t be farther from the expressionist spectacle Skolimowski puts on, a visual symphony that is drenched with experimental ambitions without ever seeming pretentious or daring for the sake of it. Conversely, Eo shows the maturity of an artist and his confidence in letting the show be steered, admittedly for the first time to this extent in his career, by the creative genius of his collaborators. Polish composer Paweł Mykietyn writes a superb score that goes far beyond the traditional concept of soundtrack. The entire film is arguably conceived as an immersive musical experience. Cinematographer Michal Dymek talked about a synergistic clash between his more pragmatic approach and Skolimowski’s free jazz process. More than a few are the scenes that still make me wonder where and how did they come from. After Eo is savagely beaten by a group of demented football supporters, we cut to a strange tracking shot of a quadrupedal robot clumsily walking in the dark on a dried field, to eventually stop in front of a perfectly flat reflecting surface. Further into our donkey’s epic, we are drawn into another striking, near mystical night shot on a skier, the snow ahead hardly lit by a head-torch, and the image flipped in post.
Now, whoever criticised or didn’t quite respond to it has no doubt a point, though what remains aside from any subjective position is that Eo provides an extraordinary sensorial trip that is substantially different when seen on the big screen. Especially in a time where the audiences are barricading themselves into smaller spaces, a film like this claims back the importance o the physical place and defines the art. Lucky me to have bumped into it by chance, as is anyone who saw it in a cinema. Because theirs only is the privilege and the joy to have been reminded what cinema itself is about.