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Rating: I watched “Le città di pianura”, intrigued by the excellent reviews I had read online, which described it as a sort of road movie set in a Veneto/far west.
But? What can I say? Probably the various reviewers have their own idea of Veneto, certainly different from those who actually live there. The film is very weak, with a thin plot and a peak that lies only in its very, very high alcohol content. The characters are portrayed with a certain flair, but they are not much helped by the screenplay, which is mostly made up of clichés—drinking the last glass as the only meaning of life, adults who never really grew up, and the presence of a young architecture student (a good Filippo Scotti, the one from Sorrentino’s “E’ stata la mano di dio”), whom it’s hard to believe would get involved so easily in three days of drunken rampages across the Venetian plain.
There are a few good ideas—the episode at the villa (with a nod to Amici miei) threatened by the construction of a fanciful Lisbon-Treviso-Budapest highway, Carlo Scarpa and the visit to the Brion tomb, the theory of marginal utility in economics explained perfectly with a few slices of salami (it would be nice to bring this to university microeconomics lectures), the treasure map (though constructed with some hesitation and ultimately resolved far too hastily). But these little gems drown (in every sense of the word) among the alcoholic haze and a central part of the film that wanders a bit aimlessly.
In conclusion, I don’t think I’ve seen an unmissable movie (it was even a Sunday and I paid 9 euros), and I doubt a future TV release is anything to wait for with much anticipation.
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