•
Rating: Welcome back everyone, I would like to dedicate this umpteenth stage in the rediscovery of the "minor" Italian cinema to two unforgettable icons of late '70s Italian soft-core - Gloria Guida and Lilli Carati - and, at the same time, to one of the most talented yet neglected genre film directors in our micro history of celluloid: Fernando Di Leo (1932-2003).
The three characters in question joined forces in this "Avere vent'anni" (1978), a film that, to this day, boasts the reputation of a cursed work, plagued at the distribution level, due to the shocking nature of the themes addressed and the violence, psychological before physical in my opinion, that the Puglian-born director portrayed in this work.
Let's make it clear right away that "Avere vent'anni" cannot be classified - despite the actresses involved - as an erotic genre film, rather using the icons of our local sensuality for a more complex and uncompromising discourse on the generation of '77, decidedly less publicized, remembered, and glorified than that of '68, perhaps also for having vanished in the reflux and heroin, and on the cost of the paths of emancipation for young people (women in particular) within a fundamentally conservative society like that of Italy at the time.
In the film, the abundant nudity of Guida and Carati is not used to titillate modest adolescent urges, but to denote the events of two young girls, a little naive and a little lost, who enter a late '70s "commune": an environment no longer ideologized as in the previous decade. The commune, managed by a certain Nazzareno (Vittorio Caprioli), is rather a gathering place for borderline outcasts, including a sensual junkie (Ray Lovelock), a mime completely impervious to worldly events (Leopoldo Mastelloni) and other subjects of dubious attitudes and null prospects.
In the commune, the two girls experiment with every form of promiscuity, every type of cultural experience alternative to the patriarchal and chauvinist canon (reading the poem "Scum" included), in search of a new center of balance and equilibrium, substitutive of the one represented, in one case, by the family of origin, in the other, by the thin life of an orphan and companion. They earn a living, contributing to the maintenance of the structure, as unlikely door-to-door encyclopedia saleswomen (here too demolishing patriarchal culture), until the commune is dissolved after yet another police raid: back on the road, in the naive belief that they can assert themselves individually and eccentrically in the world, they have to deal with a gang of brutal rapists in a tragic and chilling finale (not recommended for the sensitive).
Let’s clarify right away that the film is successful only halfway, it cannot be classified among the director's best works, being more interesting for the message than for the content: content that we can define at least as slapdash, due to a sometimes disorganized plot, other times slow and rather boring, for a sometimes superficial and sketchy representation of characters (all the members of the commune, the same police commissioner played by a Giorgio Bracardi (!) who poorly imitates Volontè from "Investigation...", the old professor to whom Carati proposes the encyclopedia and something else), for sometimes embarrassing dialogues, for the sadistic and vulgar violence of the finale.
Different, however, is the discourse concerning the message that this film transmits to us thirty years after its tormented release, to be grasped from multiple perspectives.
There is certainly the use of the beauty (more so than the talents) of Guida and Carati to overturn the sense of much erotic cinema of the time, verifying the intuitions that Pasolini had already adopted in the Decameron and, especially, in Salò, about the commodification of bodies and their consumption by power holders, in their thousand forms (here, a gang of delinquents); but, going further, in "Avere vent'anni" you can glimpse a dramatic representation of intergenerational conflicts and the action-reaction relationship typical of all organized societies: the promoter of change, the agent that breaks tradition, the cultural paradigm of the past, habits and conformism seem at first to have the upper hand, only to be swallowed, destroyed, literally ripped apart by the antibodies that every form of power (legal, or, not so paradoxically, illegal) carries within itself to ensure its self-preservation.
The two girls, compared to the external social context of the commune, thus seem the embodiment of the tempting Eve, the "diabolic" figure who literally tries to separate Life from Tradition, ending up destined to succumb, to be annihilated, in this failed attempt.
Discourse that, by extension, can be applied to all representatives of the Guida and Carati generation, those born in the '50s who, after the creative explosion of the late '70s - ended up succumbing in the following decade without ever becoming adults: from Andrea Pazienza staying within our latitudes, or Keith Haring, to transcend at a global level.
It's worth noting how the same creators of this film had, in real life, a fate no less singular and symbolic than that of the characters represented in Avere vent'anni: Carati lived the '80s as a cocaine addict and hardcore starlet, Guida as a retired family mother alongside the mature Giorgio Guidi, Di Leo gradually stopped making cinema, in an era perhaps incapable of understanding attempts to break preset languages.
If "Avere vent'anni" was a problem, imagine having thirty or forty!
Paradigmatically Yours,
Il_Paolo
Loading comments slowly
