Armando Armand
Pinocchio Forever

The Blue Fairy, desperate, searches for Pinocchio and finds him sitting on the riverbank, motionless with a blank stare. She speaks to him through tears and smiles, telling him that the theater and the company are death. But the Fairy is pregnant and is kidnapped by a mysterious man who takes her to give birth in an abandoned farmhouse, full of coffins. She gives birth to a black wooden fetish, cared for by a kind of black witch-stepmother. After that, Pinocchio, who has a rabbit in a coat instead of a talking cricket as his wise advisor, faces the temptations of human life, experiences the desires of the flesh and sex, and learns a lesson that perhaps Collodi would not have agreed with, but which today seems inevitably wise, albeit inevitably leading to a disastrous end. Only the puppets are happy: becoming embodied is not a good deal and not worth it.
Armando Armand, an independent director from Turin, already known for the controversial "La loggia" of 2014, creates a short film with intense colors and no half measures, bringing the universal figure of the Collodian puppet into an infernal circle of icy urban suburbs and subtle conceptual tour de forces. Shot with a style that mixes tangible craftsmanship and visionary improvisation, among naked bodies, Lynchian sequences, sadomasochistic deliriums, and constant nods to industrial culture, the author does not mind scratching with the nail of the grotesque a legendary and formative figure that has assumed almost Christlike stature over time. Pinocchio, or the humble origins and the impossibility of redeeming oneself from the malevolent temptations of the human world, unless by paying the price of one's own life. Only his sacrifice does not save humanity; it doesn't even come close to saving the human world from sin.
On the surface, it seems that the director wanted to exploit intense colors to keep the viewer's attention focused. But the visual suggestion of the film is one with the lesson that off-screen voices gradually address to Pinocchio (the rabbit? Geppetto?). A lesson certainly not moralistic, perhaps provocative, but undoubtedly inescapable. Even if the spectator then hardly frees themselves from the seduction of flesh and blood, the spectator who is well represented in the final scene, the one in the small theater where Pinocchio somehow finds a way to solve all the dilemmas of his wretched existence - for better or worse - in the theater. Spectators with faces covered by black masks, ready to thrill and to unleash the vilest lusts while filming everything with their smartphones. But in truth, it's not provocation because Armand merely makes functional the long wave of human perversion, on which float and bounce the voyeuristic morbities of those who await the grim fates of the freak, the different, the marginal. Thinking they will come to feel compassion, yet ultimately enjoying satisfied the massacre and the sacrifice.
The theater is the cathartic place destined to also deliver a good punch in the stomach, why not? That seems to hurt until the curtain closes and the pain disappears. The staging for humans is fiction with an exceptional realistic power. For the puppet, it's a reality lived with the illusion of fiction. Only by remaining on this side of the tightly closed curtain, without letting the stage be contaminated by the gaze, desires, and vices of "those of flesh," can a puppet be calm and serene. Otherwise, it will know temptation and become a victim of the world’s logic beyond the curtain.
Very well-crafted costumes and masks, as well as makeup. Beautiful is the sequence with the real puppets. Actors are generally passable and in line with the type of production, with some standout performances including the pregnant Fairy, who in the scene of the fatal childbirth is clearly truly pregnant.
Perfectly fitting music by Deca, with the main theme of the film being an authentic sound addiction: listened to once, it cannot be removed from your mind.