Giuseppe Lazzari
Sentirsidire un film da vedere

I recently purchased the Universal Pictures DVD of the Italian film Sentirsidire. The work is primarily characterized by a pseudo-experimental approach to its staging. From this perspective, director Giuseppe Lazzari spares no effort, filling the visual apparatus of his debut work with daring photographic solutions, unusual camera movements, raw cuts in editing, and an almost "expressionist" sound, softened by the songs of Damien Rice and James Morrison, which help amplify the "existentialist" sense of the narrative. A narrative in which there is room for remote and very recent reminiscences, geographically near or far, more or less recognizable. From Mike Leigh's almost two-decade-old Naked - for the sense of metropolitan despair emanating from the outdoor scenes, especially the nighttime ones in the first part - to Luca Guadagnino's more recent Io sono l'amore - for the abrasive portrait of the placid and amniotic provincial bourgeoisie, hiding a double layer of unconfessable anxieties and repressions -, it is a constant and relentless chase of more or less recognizable echoes and moderately "aware" suggestions. A collection of signs that allows Sentirsi dire to escape the pitfalls of an aesthetic and narrative modality tending towards queerness (which would have plunged it into the realm of the cliché) and to abandon without regrets the programmatic nature of a "thesis" narrative. Just enough to make this oblique and occasionally disorienting debut work an object worthy of attention, at least by virtue of its intrinsic "strangeness"... A quality that should not be lightly disregarded, especially in a context like the Italian one, where there is a competition to see who can be more tragically "normal."