Francesco Sossai
Le città di pianura

THE REVIEW

Despite the awards it has (incredibly) won, this film is an absolute disappointment: it doesn’t move, doesn’t engage, doesn’t interest. It doesn’t even irritate. It’s absolute nothingness. A pretentious and insipid work, which haphazardly references Il Sorpasso, Amici miei, Nanni Moretti’s Ecce bombo (there, they waited for the dawn by the sea and it came from the mountains, here they go to pick up their friend returning from Argentina at Treviso airport and instead he arrives at Venice airport), and American road movies from the 1970s. The film tells the graceless and weightless story of two half-drunks wandering from bar to bar in the Veneto region between Venice and Treviso, always searching for the ‘last drink’, which is never actually the last. The encounter with a naive architecture student of southern origin will give rise to a brief yet intense and unexpected friendship.

It might seem like a nice idea. And yet, no—it’s a film that spins its wheels, as pretentious as it is inconsistent, dealing with an essentially superficial theme, and relying on stereotypes: the drunken Veneto local, the intellectual southern student, the working-class layabout nobody knows how he supports himself, with a sprinkle of cheap parochialism (“Rovigo? Non esiste…”).

To be up-to-date and avoid seeming too much like a '60s movie, the obligatory homosexual interlude and a snort of coke in the bathrooms couldn’t be missed. And then, on with the intellectual winks (the tomb of architect Scarpa, the concept of marginal utility), the poor metaphors: the ice cream with a bitter aftertaste ending up smashed on the road, or poor (Eu)Genio who, after being the thread running through the film, is ultimately abandoned to his fate, just before the ending.

And what about the style? Grand camera moves, needlessly sinuous and enveloping, dizzying shots from the car as it takes one hairpin turn after another, details even closer than close-ups on the two protagonists (who, to be fair, are excellent).

In the end, annihilated and half-asleep more than exasperated, you can’t help but symbolically embrace the father of one of the protagonists when he says to our two glass-raising heroes: aren’t you ever going to grow up?

And this flimsy little movie, which absolutely no one needed, which spins in circles, doesn’t move you, irritates, and finally bores, was supposed to have won 8 David di Donatello awards? Incredible… A symptom of the tragic state of our cinema.

P.s. How did they dare compare this director to the great and much-missed Mazzacurati?

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