The screeching violin with which Yorgos Lanthimos has chosen to accompany the first image of Poor Creatures! is an auditory reminder that takes the audience back to the musical performance of the legendary Frau Blücher, played by Cloris Leachman in Frankenstein Jr. and allows the author to put his cards on the table: his film will range freely between genres, mixing horror, cyberpunk science fiction and comedy, all to tell an exhilarating tale of female emancipation.
One of the great cinematic news of this Mostra is the new freedom that filmmakers allow themselves. They make personal art-house products, freely mixing the canons of genres to create films that are no longer caged in preconstituted schemes.
The phenomenon has infected cinemas all over the world: in Italy, Edoardo De Angelis, who had already demonstrated his ability to break out of the mould in a film like Indivisibili, tried his hand at the clichés of the classic maritime war movie to talk about the humanitarian duty to rescue at sea; Stefano Sollima, a master of action and noir, reinterprets Roman crime in a sorrowful and crepuscular key to address the theme of fatherhood denied and regained. Back abroad: Luc Besson, who has long danced between genres, offers the unusual noir Dogman, while Pablo Larraín draws on the myth of Nosferatu, rereading the canons of vampire cinema, for a lucid denunciation of the horrors generated in Chile by the bloodthirsty dictator Pinochet.
Having seen that actors and directors no longer have a problem in dealing with television seriality, thus succeeding in gaining a wider audience than in the theatres, the new frontier of film language now seems for directors to stamp their authorial mark in works that, thanks to the unprejudiced use of genres, can entertain the audience by delivering what was once the dreaded and rhetorical message in homoeopathic form.
Art-house GENRE
