ENEA
Italy, 2023 Directed by Pietro Castellitto Starring Pietro Castellitto, Giorgio Quarzo Guarascio, Benedetta Porcaroli, Chiara Noschese, Giorgio Montanini, Adamo Dionisi, Matteo Branciamore, Cesare Castellitto, Sergio Castellitto Production The Apartment Pictures, Vision Distribution, Frenesy Film Company, Giovane Film Running time 117’
Italy plays the ace Pietro Castellitto and comes up with the fourth Italian film competing for the Golden Lion. It is with Enea that the young director, screenwriter and actor returns to the Lido, this time to compete in the major league after his acclaimed debut feature I Predatori in 2020, winner of the Orizzonti award for best screenplay, as well as the Nastro d’Argento and David di Donatello as best debut director. And if “The second album is always the hardest,” sang Caparezza, the second film is no less. It is the reason why eyes are wide open on Castellitto Jr. “Enea chases after the myth he bears in his name: he does it to feel alive in a dead and decadent age,” reads the incipit of the film’s synopsis, in which Rome once again serves as a backdrop for the protagonists’ vicissitudes through a lens that observes dysfunctional families, nightclubs, drug dealing, moral and social corruption. It’s a “Great Ugliness,” as Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera defined Castellitto’s film, denouncing cynicism and hypocrisy with a new cinematic language. In parallel and, at the same time, in the depth of the work move the mechanisms of family ties, with the melancholy that permeates the personality of a father, the sense of defeat that weaves the soul of a mother, and the problems at school that punctuate the daily life of a brother. “Enea is a gangster movie without the gangster part. It is a genre story without the genre. The criminal component of the film travels silently on a hidden track and suddenly overflows into the cracks of everyday relationships, unsettling the unsuspecting protagonists,” Pietro, who also wanted to direct his father Sergio and younger brother, Cesare, in his second feature, tells us. “The mystery of youth moves the protagonists,” the director further explains, “They don’t do what they do either for money or power, but perhaps out of vitality, to test the heart, to understand to what extent one can feel alive today, at the dawn of this new millennium, saturated with wars told and attacks have only seen. Along with the three Castellittos mentioned above, the cast also includes Benedetta Porcaroli, Giorgio Quarzo Guarascio, Chiara Noschese, Giorgio Montanini, Adamo Dionisi and Matteo Branciamore.
