by Redazione Ennesimo Film Festival
Here the second part of the review by Lucapedia of the Ennesimo Film Festival selected movies.
PORQUE NO
A relevant budget is not necessary to make an interesting film: a couple of really good actresses, a strong theatre-like screenplay and a non-conventional location are enough. The sound may be far from perfect, but the efficacy of how it deals with such a delicate topic is striking.
RAISA
The stratagem of the mysterious object around which the whole screenplay revolves and is revealed only in the scene introducing the ending always works in shorts. The underlying mechanism is not the most original one, but original is the object (and all that it implicates) and everything else moves to the background.
RATZINGER VUOLE TORNARE
A funny mixture of different tv styles (from trash programs to infomercials, fortune-tellers to fashion channels) with the goal to be sharp and desecrating from the first to (especially) the last scene. The great masters Ciprì and Maresco are unmatchable, but this is the right road.
SPELLETJESAVOND
Only in northern Europe a board game can become the subject and simultaneously the metaphor at the core of a film. A pretty ordinary beginning is followed by a truly remarkable escalation of tension, but even more successful is the double twist at the ending, which catches by surprise and amuses with no moralist or “intellectual” demands.
STATE OF EMERGENCY
Just a handful of frenetic minutes to paint a sharp picture of our society, focusing in particular on its “love for hate” (quoting Bauman), so rooted to turn into “addiction to hate” and suspect. Truly amusing is the discordant dichotomy between dialogues and what happens during the scenes.
THE CHOP
A lively and intelligent comedy, founded on the nice idea that an interesting job offer is all that is needed for young generations to forget any religious and racial prejudice. And, in the ending, it can even make fun of capitalism: in short, if the world was always like this, we would not have much to worry about.
THE REINVENTION OF NORMAL
It is truly complicated to reduce the arguments of a documentary in a handful of minutes without distorting its subject and going no deeper than what is enough. Such an attempt is therefore admirable, as it openly talks about art, its genesis and its producers (just like the main character Dominic Wilcox), but above all about worldviews that need to change.
THE TUNNEL
A timeless and offbeat story, aesthetically evoking the smoky atmosphere of the past and almost looking like a homage to Kafka’s short stories: there are an ordinary man, useless authorities, fear for the unknown and a danger as mysterious as symbolic. Stimulating.
TRIAL AND ERROR
In the history of cinema, animation and experimentation have always walked side by side: also in this case, the border is thin, thanks to a nicely surreal story, depicted with a few, easy strokes, that remind of a kid’s drawings on a paper; inevitably, even more pale is the difference with visual arts.
WALKING HOME
A mumblecore spirit, as fresh as its young characters, apparently, an attempt to pay homage to the forerunner of this genre, Linklater’s “Before Sunrise”. It may even be considered a sort of 2.0 reboot, with the truly nice addition of the inevitable technological component.
Who’s LUCA BUSANI?
A great expert in technology, Luca is also fond of board games, and mainly of cinema in all its features. He has no prejudices for what concerns genres and sub-genres, but he has a thing for anything which is mumblecore, or was shot with a budget lower than Sofia Coppola’s pocket money when she was 15.
