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Rating: Anywhere You Protect Me (2018) is the second feature film by Bonifacio Angus, a Sardinian from Sassari in his 40s (sassà microphone test).
Set in Sardinia, Anywhere You Protect Me is the story of Alessandro (Alessandro Gazale), a 50-year-old who sings (Sardinian folk songs) at village festivals, on a rickety stage, accompanied by an accordion and an acoustic guitar, and if he gets 20 spectators, it's sold-out.
Alessandro sings, drinks, plays video poker, is gruff, irascible, violent, steals money from his mother.
Alessandro is alone.
Alessandro is a failure.
Hospitalized in a psychiatric facility, he meets Francesca (Francesca Niedda), a woman in her 30s, also confined and with a child entrusted to social services.
Together, they will seek the path to redemption or escape.
A very interesting work, it's a cinema that gets its hands dirty, that takes us to the other side of the moon, among the losers, the invisible ones, those who pass by and you turn the other way or scratch your head or look at your phone for no reason.
Directed with a dry style and a steady hand, Anywhere You Protect Me takes us around Sardinia (sun-drenched, barren, indifferent, beautiful) between an ichnusa and a whisky (come on, give me another negroni ... I'm sad) between a slap and a caress.
Alessandro and Francesca (but do you love me...??) speak little but look each other in the eyes.
A sparse film, made of silences, of looks. A painful, solemn, concrete, bitter, important, necessary, raw, very beautiful film.
There is this ancient gaze, this dryness that is all Sardinian (like the ancient gaze), ancient and severe I would add.
And there is this damn life that sometimes really makes you say... but what a fucking shit is it... what sense does it make? ...but at the same time, you know that it still deserves to be lived, come what may.
And then there's the finale, the grand finale, because sometimes with the finale you stake everything, and if you mess it up, everything goes to hell, but this time no. The finale is more beautiful than the film.
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