Daniele D'anza
ESP

Zavattarello Castle, September 2024, a public event is underway on methodologies for investigating the existence of ghosts.
One of the audience, a retired journalist, says, "there was a dramatization, about twenty years ago, starring Paolo Stoppa if I'm not mistaken, centered on a Dutch psychic, Croiset."

He continues, in a different dimension.

Violent removal from the context, I am tossed around after a couple of unsuccessful attempts in the living room and the kitchen of my childhood home, my face pressed against the television screen so that I struggle to see the scene; with my nose pressed against the glass I nonetheless remain attentive to the signals coming from the video, while beneath it continues speaking: it's just background noise.

Then with the same violence and inevitability I return from Orion's nebula and I'm there again in the hall of Zavattarello Castle.
I notice that my journey was quick and no one noticed anything.

After the journalist's speech, I counter with something like "time passed quickly for us: it wasn’t twenty years ago, it was 1975, and the dramatization was called ESP."
He lights up, "bravo!, what a memory!"
Returning from Orion I had made a determination, and I express it: "maybe it's available on RaiPlay. You can find very interesting things."

It's true, on RaiPlay you can find very interesting things, and Rai indeed produced memorable dramatizations at the time, at a time when it had a cultural development function that was completely lost from Mediaset onwards.
Two examples - the first ones - that come to mind, known to all those who passed through those times: A come Andromeda, and Il segno del Comando.
This ESP is not known to everyone. And indeed since 1973 it took 51 years to flash back to my mind from where it was hidden in Orion.
Because I too was wrong, I said "1975", in truth it was 1973.
Well my estimate was better than his.
And - yes - ESP is on RaiPlay.

Directed by Daniele D'anza, director of Il segno del comando, the two works explored the same territory of the paranormal.
Because ESP means Extra Sensory Perceptions.

A soft paranormal, not extreme and flaunted as is the trend today, the only way to draw attention from a savvy and saturated audience, but elegant and somewhat understated, "it's more about what I inspire in you than what I tell you and especially about what I show you."

Without a doubt, the development of this genre in Italy was somehow inspired and promoted by the exploits of Massimo Inardi, who in the context of the beloved old Rischiatutto by Mike Bongiorno just a couple of years earlier introduced to the unwitting Italian general public the stories and the potentials of parapsychology.
"Flash movie"? maybe. But the good result puts the doubt in the background.

Gerard Croiset was a historical character.
His exploits are well documented, as his willingness to collaborate with the Police and with the University has crystallized his activities in reports and studies that constitute some of the clearest and least debatable sources in the set of "objective" testimonies of the existence of something beyond the reach of the five senses.
"Extra Sensory Perceptions."

We find Croiset dealing from time to time with the disappearance of a child, with the mystery of a Nazi occupying officer found dead in a column of a building, with the residues of "bad" energies that pervade Nazi concentration camps in Austria.

All of this is historically documented; the dialogues are naturally reconstructions of imagination and the stories were enriched with arbitrary details with the aim of providing what is called "glue logic," the thread that links the various scenes together to provide them with coherence and continuity of narrative; but it is "glue logic," precisely, for the rest the director presents what happened. Without emphasis, without sensationalism.

Excellent Stoppa's mastery in rendering this character in a well-rounded way, with his inferiority complexes ("I'm just a grocer..."), with his bursts of pride, with his ever-detectable irony between the lines.
Ten out of ten for Stoppa; a hundred out of a hundred.

I greatly appreciate D'anza's direction. The described result is all his merit.
Poor - or aged poorly - audio management.
Not so much for the direct sound dialogues, which in themselves are not of poor quality, but for the choice - probably an intentional experiment - to keep the ambient noises and soundtrack about ten decibels above the dialogues;
with the result that the latter are very often hardly understandable, and in some cases completely incomprehensible.

My corrected rating was intended to be four stars (I give 5 stars only to masterpieces), but one star is lost along the way precisely because of this rather unfortunate audio track.

Noteworthy is the opening theme and several internal inserts made with the Theremin, a young musical instrument then, and greatly used in those years to create gothic suggestive atmospheres.