Dino Risi
Sono Fotogenico

Hello everyone, welcome back, and most importantly, happy summer!

As you probably know, I rarely return, and only for specific occasions, to review with and for you on this splendid site, depending on events, sensations, impressions, or, quite simply, chance.

This time, the event is one of those festive ones, and it just so happened (or was it Fate?) that it wasn't celebrated at all in a free exchange area of artistic opinions like DeBaser, despite its undeniable importance.

As usual, burdened by the inertia of others, it's up to me to duly celebrate the seventieth birthday - "genetliaco" doesn't suit him, much as mourning suits Electra - of one of the heroes of my childhood and youth: Renato Pozzetto himself.

More than a wish, mine is a laudatio, of Renato, and of times past, as the Latins would say, and therefore I kindly ask you to take it as such, sparing me your usual admonitions about my tendency to confuse fireflies for lanterns, art for craft, and so on.

So, here we are today writing about Renato Pozzetto, his style, and his laughter, his vocation, his spleen.

I could do it by recounting thousands of anecdotes, even personal ones, drawn from my family life and the affection we feel at home for him: my mother, for example, always asked me to find the tape of "Tango Diverso" from "La Patata Bollente," but it wasn't for sale; a friend of mine, unfortunately deceased several years ago, boasted of having met him and flaunted, during elementary school years, a photo with him and Ornella Muti, taken at a trade fair in Milan.

I could do it by recalling dozens and dozens of films, reminiscing about the magic of "Mia moglie è una strega" ('80) (magic/moments....investing in "Canistracci Oil"), "La casa stregata" ('81) (and the Neapolitan Great Dane), "Mani di fata" ('83) (Eleonora Giorgi at her best, and the little family in a Lancia Prisma), "Ecco noi per esempio" ('77) (Palmambrogio vs "Milano odia"), not to mention Gandhi and his travels between the USSR and Holland, the taxi driver kidnapped by Rosalia's brothers, the shipowner who prostitutes himself, the country boy and the strange brother, the saxophonist, Paolo Barca, or even the commissioner in the Neapolitan detective story.

However, I prefer to do it by telling you about what is probably, if not his best film or the most amusing, certainly the one that best defines Renato, and perhaps the one destined to be the furrow, the trace, he left in Italian cinema: "Sono fotogenico," by Dino Risi, in the blessed year 1980.

The feature film, briefly and without going into too much detail, tells the story of Antonio, a young slacker who still lives with his parents in the small town of Laveno, Lake Maggiore, and who, instead of working or thinking about settling down with a local girl, in imitation of his sister and brother-in-law (a splendid Boldi, unusually understated), dreams of breaking into the cinema world like Robert De Niro or Sylvester Stallone, leaving the small and tired provincial town for the great welcoming Rome, Hollywood on the Tiber, Mecca of local cinema, where everything that cannot be achieved by the lake becomes, suddenly and almost by magic, achievable, expanding the range of choices and, with it, quality of life.

The whole film unfolds by telling us about the journey, back and forth from Laveno to Rome, where Antonio experiences all the hardships of city life, the loneliness of a small boarding house shared with strangers, the cruelty of a cinema world seen from the inside, where one is goods, flesh for unscrupulous deal makers, and where the line between auteur culture and pornography is thin, personal relationships are wavering and ambiguous, so much so that love can appear in the guise of a woman as splendid as unresolved (Edwige Fenech in her best years; though the appearance of Barbara Bouchet as herself is as captivating as always and more), who eventually uses our bold youth for her own ends, leaving him with the weight of disappointment, but not only, in a conclusion as cynical as it is bitter, which I obviously will not spoil for you.

The story, in the end, is very similar to that of "Ecco noi per esempio" or "Il ragazzo di campagna" ('84), where the country mouse, having seen and known the confusion of the city, falls back on his choices and returns home, with the variant that in a film like this, the nostos is neither serene nor resolved but leaves that subtle melancholy of things left halfway, a shattered mirror in which Antonio realizes he's neither like De Niro in Taxi Driver nor like Stallone in Rocky, but a pale imitation of the warrior, weakened by life and events he couldn't control, of a wave he couldn't surf.

And behold, the lake, often central to Pozzetto's life and films, becomes not only the enclosed place to live like Candide but also the deep water to reflect his thoughts, memories, the awareness of his failures, and the necessity to move on – nearly as deep as the sea of the Tremiti islands of Lucio Dalla, for whom "thought is like the ocean, you cannot block it, you cannot fence it" – a house where the man of reflux, in one of the murkiest years of our recent history, a watershed between the era of possible and unfulfilled revolutions and the successes of the thirties, almost implodes, and as Lolli sang a few years earlier and as I often like to repeat, he "clears the roads of dreams".

All this, and much more, is "Sono fotogenico," a film where Risi and Pozzetto play with metacinema, desecrating a world, an environment, and a bit of their own image, almost like "Day for Night" for less refined but hungrier audiences than Truffaut's.

Congratulations, then, Renato, and a heartfelt thank you.

May the stardust memories represented by "Sono Fotogenico" not weigh you down for the next thirty years, while with my glass spoon I dig into the memory of the lightness you have given me, and many others, letting us float on the depths of waters that often reclaim us, while we strike and take punches like Rocky Balboa or Rocky Barbella.

Memorably Yours (but also Yours)

Il_Paolo