Edoardo de Angelis
Indivisibili

Indivisibili (2016)

Directed by: Edoardo De Angelis

Screenplay: Edoardo De Angelis, Nicola Guaglianone, Barbara Petronio

Starring: Angela and Marianna Fontana (Viola and Dasy, conjoined twins)

Massimiliano Rossi: the father

Antonia Truppola: the mother

Gianfranco Gallo: the priest

Peppe Servillo (from Avion Travel, Tony's brother): the doctor

Et cetera

There are these two conjoined twin sisters, joined at the side at the level of the thigh.

They are 18 years old and are the breadwinners of the family.

They are beautiful and they sing. They sing well. At weddings, at baptisms of those who have money and who pay well. Pimp families, Camorra members, those kinds of people.

They are considered almost like saints, so even the priest profits from them (touch them and make a donation) but it's a sham.

They are spectacle freaks, and the family exploits them.

Castel Volturno, today.

A particularly degraded area of Campania.

Poverty, filth, drugs, prostitution.

Two inseparable angels, two handicapped individuals living their sad fate in a hallucinatory scenario, a gambling father and a drug-addicted mother, two monsters. Not to mention the priest.

But at 18 you start to understand, you start to become aware of what you are and what is around you, or rather around both of you. If then a passing doctor also tells you that it's possible to separate you surgically... (but why haven't you separated them yet?).

A tough film. The screenplay is by Guaglianone, the one from "They Call Me Jeeg Robot," and it shows.

The direction is of good quality, splendid the beginning with the prostitutes returning to their hovels at dawn while a mournful sax accompanies their dismal end-of-shift and with a tracking shot that follows them to then enter the bedroom of the two girls who are about to wake up.

An auteur film, audacious, bitter. Reminds one of Ugly, Dirty and Bad, by Scola and I realize that evil has no social class, it's a prerogative of both the rich and the poor.

In the total and unbearable degradation that transcends not only the human condition but even the (feelings???) of two parents towards those poor creatures from their own flesh and blood, we therefore follow the events of these two sisters who deliver a performance of rare intensity, twins in real life, who study at the conservatory.

The music by Enzo Avitabile (award-winning) endows the work with a painful grandeur.

Perhaps I found excessive, almost stereotypical, the characterization of the characters, true and proper monsters, I wouldn't know how else to define them... this at a first analysis: reflecting longer I realize that reality is even worse and so I say that all in all it suits that such human vomit was represented like this.

I preferred the first part, really raw and distressing. In any case, it is a touching film, well directed and acted.

Seek it out.

And yet I remembered that on Debaser it had already been reviewed... possible? I write Indivisibili and ta-daaa there's aleradio's review done hot off the press, when the film first came out anyway.

But I watched it yesterday at Piazza San Cosimato, at the Trastevere Cinema Festival and at the end of the film we hear a song by Janis Joplin sung by the twins. Then the film ends, the screen goes black but the song continues... why? Because in the end they arrived in flesh and bone, beautiful, wonderful, perfectly separated but without a doubt... indivisible!

There they were, there was the director, there was the entire cast, seeing them in the end was chilling.

Aleradio, you may have written it first but I got the better of you. Yes, I got the better of you...