Bruno Corbucci
La casa stregata

LA RECENSIONE

It is truly the greatest masterpieces of art that manage to contain yet transcend their own era: they become timeless works, banners with marvelous inlays to display with patriotic pride to all of humanity.
Among this select elite, the cinematic work "La Casa Stregata" by Bruno Corbucci stands as a prominent representative.

Through a strenuous hermeneutic effort, the film reinterprets and makes its own the lessons of the great masters of narrative, retracing a gnoseological path that, from twentieth-century minimalism, leads the viewer to the origins, to the aleph of Western culture.
The incipit of the work immediately recalls Joyce's minimalism, where a new Ulysses, Renato, is adrift in the punk daily life of the postmodern era. Suddenly, the chasm of the unknown, the esoteric call that leads him into an unsettling mansion, opens before him; guiding him is the dog Gateano, an anthropomorphic guardian of transhuman mysteries, who, like a modern Cerberus of the Plutonian shores of the Styx, leads him towards his ectoplasmic destiny. And, in a journey that digs into the darkest mazes of the human psyche, the ghost becomes an epiphany of the divine "ananke," which mercilessly sucks the mortal into its vortex, consoled only by the awareness of being " kalòs kagathòs".
In this polymorphic Babel, the immense Renatone stands at the level of the epic hero, who, with indomitable vigor, opposes the evil web spun by dark demons, who intend to make him pay for mistakes committed not by him, but by the hubristic excesses of his ancestors.
The scene where the three protagonists sip, in a complicated subjective tangle made of subtle calembours, esoteric potions of Hoffmanian memory, is admirable, through which the fearless protagonist encounters the sweet and intoxicated Dionysian frenzy. Only the intervention of a superior fate will manage to avoid the otherwise inevitable sparagmos, akin to the Theban rulers of the Euripidean tragedy. In a dazzling finale, the Divine Renato will reach catharsis, finally managing to seize the sweet fruit of the virginal bride.

It is more than evident that Corbucci's work represents an ideal bridge between the classical world and modernity, where Cinema reaches its highest peaks thanks to a symbolism that allows the viewer to abstract from earthly contingencies, leading them to a purer and higher state of spirit.