Gabriele Salvatores
Quo Vadis, Baby?

On the white background of the poster stands a leg, wrapped in the dense weave of a stocking, a towering stiletto heel gets dirty in a trickle of blood, while the unmistakable notes of the song "impressioni di settembre" by PFM timidly offer us a hand to accompany us towards Gabriele Salvatores' latest cinematic endeavor.

The film, based on the book of the same name, tells the story of Giorgia Cantini, a detective in her father's investigative agency, forced to relive and fight the ghosts of the past: one day, she receives some videotapes of her sister Ada (who committed suicide sixteen years earlier) from a friend. This journey through family memories and secrets will be her most difficult investigation. Giorgia will have to come to terms with the figure of a father unable to listen, because he is consumed by pain and remorse, tired of his responsibilities as a parent. Along the way, she will meet two men: a loyal commissioner and a mysterious professor who hides an uncomfortable secret...

The story takes place in Bologna, which appears to the viewer as a tangle of streets pulsing with life of their own, permeated with a dark and claustrophobic atmosphere, as obscure as the remote corners of the human soul. Salvatores significantly distances himself from his usual style, showing himself to be a careful experimenter (the film, in fact, is shot entirely in digital, with unique and bold shots, tending towards visual aesthetics) and manages to bring to life a typical noir story.

The characterization of the characters proves to be perfect: the singer Angela Baraldi magnificently plays Giorgia, an androgynous metropolitan detective who always lives on the edge of everyday life and sentimental precariousness; Ada appears as a dark and melancholic yet sunny character at the same time, almost like an ethereal but immanent presence in every small object related to her (first among all the videotapes); Luigi Maria Burruano plays Giorgia's father, an undoubtedly uncomfortable and multifaceted figure, an incarnation of the incommunicability between parents and children, and so precarious between pain and anger as to evoke in the viewer mixed sensations of compassion and cold indifference. The choice of soundtrack (curated by Ezio Bosso) is also excellent, allowing the film to slip along dark and rarefied pieces that accompany it along its course without ever weighing it down.

The numerous cinematic citations scattered more or less evidently throughout the film deserve a separate discussion: first of all the title ("Quo vadis, baby?" is in fact a famous phrase from Bertolucci's masterpiece, "Last Tango in Paris") and then a whole long series of nods to famous films including the aforementioned "Last Tango...", "M, the Monster of Dusseldorf" by Lang, "Jules and Jim," etc. All of this contributes to creating a sort of link between the cinema of the past and that of the present, but above all, it evokes in the viewer the peculiar sensation of watching "a film within a film." Salvatores' characters also seem to be imprisoned in a videotape, helpless spectators of a story whose ending is already known. Ultimately, we are faced with an extremely powerful film from an emotional and aesthetic point of view, with an absolutely unique style capable of engaging at 360 degrees. "Quo vadis, baby?" is a film about the charm of cinema, the dreams we all have, the challenges that hinder their realization, the false propriety of society, but above all, it is a film about ambiguity and deceit: because, as the poster also states, "the truth is a lie that has not yet been revealed"......