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Rating: Sometimes it's nice to meet again.
In those years, in Italy, debaser.it was born, there was a rock scene raising its voice through the traveling festival Tora! Tora! that traveled up and down Italy during the summer months, and the wounds of 2001 continued to bleed.
I, in the midst of this chaos, with my head and hormones in turmoil, was trying to mature and shape myself somehow during those years.
And at university, I skipped some classes to watch images from the great classics of cinema.
Furthermore, I avidly delved into the filmographies of directors awarded by some festivals: Lynch, Von Trier, Moretti, Wenders, and Emir Kusturica. They all kept me company for several years.
Then some remained and others went away. Like friends.
Yesterday I met one again, one I hadn't seen since then.
Sometimes it's nice to meet again.
And no, it's not just the nostalgia effect. Nor is it true, in this case, that the indeterminacy of memory had made everything more pleasant. I didn't miss it much.
The fact is that Jagoda, strawberries in the supermarket, written and directed by Dušan Milić and produced by Emir Kusturica, was exactly the film I needed; it tells the story of a hostage situation, one of the most improvised and improbable, inside an American supermarket newly opened in a Serbian town; it's like that afternoon of a dog day in a Slavic sauce. The film stands on antitheses: inside and outside, present and past, appearance and truth.
In this supermarket, everything is new and appealing, seductive and colorful. Inside, there are salesgirls waiting for Prince Charming, one made-up and aggressive, the other, Jagoda, fresh-faced and romantic.
Inside, there was a grandmother rudely rejected at the checkout and a grandson, Marko, an ex-soldier and clumsy kidnapper.
Outside, there is a negotiator, diplomatic and conciliating, and there are the assault troops, the commandos, ready to strike.
In interacting with each other, the characters, with heightened and embittered souls, create surreal mistakes and blunders, jokes and mockeries, amidst which, paradoxical and grotesque, emotions triumph.
And, in this stalemate, with the police outside and the hostages inside, some knots of this imported democracy and capitalism also, in a tragicomic way, come to the surface.
It's a comedy paced by the music of the No Smoking Orchestra with Kusturica, which, at times, the amused crowd, now all on the side of the kidnapper, plays as an accompaniment.
It's, in the end, a comic and insane film, grotesque and full of sympathy and pity for all the protagonists of this story.
To be rediscovered. In short, it was a nice reunion, Emir.
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