Andrea Magnani
Easy (un viaggio facile facile)

THE REVIEW

PROLOGUE.

When Easy was a kid, he was a driving prodigy.

He won 9 consecutive go-kart championships and was poised to become a Formula 1 champion.

But then, Easy started gaining weight, fell into depression, and disappeared from the scene.

Today, Easy is in his thirties, lives with his mother (played by Barbara Bouchet), and never leaves the house.

Easy has a brother (played by Libero De Rienzo) who runs a construction site. A tragedy has occurred. One of his workers, a Ukrainian, fell from scaffolding and died.

The brother suggests that Easy drive the hearse with the deceased's coffin to Ukraine to return the remains to his family.

Easy agrees.

Easy, un viaggio facile facile marks the cinematic debut of Andrea Magnani, a documentary filmmaker from Rimini, born in 1971.

The film, praised at the 2017 Locarno Festival, has nothing to do with Italian cinema of the past 20 years, which is filled with people sitting around tables talking, mobile phones, rather boring family dramas, clever yet inept thirty-somethings (but it’s not their fault), and not much else.

Easy is a true road movie.

Easy's journey (Isidoro, played by an extraordinary Nicola Nocella who, already portly, gained an additional 20kg for the role) is a surreal, grotesque, bitter, and gentle odyssey through endless landscapes, rain, snow, and wind, hunger, and loneliness.

A 35-year-old failure, chubby and depressed, finds himself alone in Ukraine, him and a coffin. Anything could happen…

Things happen, then… finally! I say finally to continue the discourse on Italian cinema of recent years where much is said but hardly anything interesting ever happens. Here, it’s the opposite. There's very little dialogue. Easy is alone in Ukraine, encounters people speaking to him in Cyrillic, and he responds in Italian (when he responds)…

Changes of location, then… finally! A dynamic film that also presents us with an unexplored land; it's not every day you see the territory and glimpses of daily life in Ukraine. So, again, not the usual Italian film with the usual faces (giallini gassman papaleo ambra argentero blablabla) shut indoors bickering (what a waste of energy to find the right dialogues, the sharp comebacks, surprising and intended to be witty or funny as needed).

Easy, a modern-day Candide, proceeds with his coffin against every adversity through deserted highways, forests, villages.

The film is also appreciated from a technical standpoint and I believe it was quite challenging to shoot, with long shots reminiscent of John Ford through woods, snow, rivers…

The soundtrack, vaguely Western in style, accompanies this curious road movie well.

Will Easy be able to complete his mission?

Go to the cinema to find out.