Memory and its secrets. Past is a key to the present. The comeback of traumas once rolled back. The quest for a father (or an identity) by any means, even digging in a common grave as in Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas or La caja directed by 2015 Golden Lion Lorenzo Vigas.
Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe we are just getting into a new era. By the way in this fateful 2021, 75% of the film in competition (and many others in the other sections) play on the need to revive, question and restage the past.
Outsider Audrey Diwan, in her film-choc L’événement, one of the great surprises of the Mostra, comes back to the miscarriage made by French writer Annie Ernaux in the early ’60s giving us a movie about women’s body and the glance of men incredibly contemporary because recreates with precise gestures, lights, colours, passions and fears an almost prehistoric past. Penélope Cruz explains to an astonished Milena Smit in Madres paralelas that she will never understand anything of her life if she doesn’t know her story and the story of her predecessors.
Paolo Sorrentino makes his most cheerful and elegiac movie, intimate and wonderful, facing with joy and freedom the crucial fracture of his life and art. Stefano Mordini comes back to the worst days of the Italian ’70s with a movie that will unleash controversy for its storytelling (less politic, more school and family). Frammartino’s Il buco suspends his underground metaphysical adventure bearing in mind very precise historical references (1961, the economic boom).
Mario Martone’s Qui rido io describes the artistic and personal story of one of the great fathers – in every sense – of Italian (and not only) theatre and cinema. Martone gives us the great thought that Italian entertainment never dared to face. The end of a long journey. And a new beginning.
