Giuseppe Tornatore
Una pura formalità

When this film was presented at Cannes, nearly everyone expected a film about Sicily, with children, or about nostalgia. Tornatore himself made sure to keep the script hidden from everyone, except the two protagonists, precisely to unsettle the viewer, and this wouldn't be the only tactic used for that purpose.
Shot at Cinecittà, in French, the film is a narrative of the pre-death state; overcoming a profound existential crisis, as well as a crisis of writing. An allegory of our country, for some, through the prolonged interrogation that serves as the focal point of the work: the film was shot in 1993, at the height of the Mani pulite scandal; an allegory, however, disavowed by the director.
Note the harmonic attention to all the components of the film, including the sound, with an atonal musical score, to which tonal elements are added concurrently with the revelation of some elements of the mystery, adhering to the dramaturgical structure of the film. The same can be said of the set design, with this perched, semi-destroyed barracks that perhaps alludes to a church, from which a sense of humidity flows, exponentially amplified by the rain and its luminous effect on the protagonists' faces.

The beginning coincides with a long first-person subjective shot that gives the idea of someone escaping, that is, Gérard Depardieu, Tornatore's first and only choice for the role of Onoff: a writer with a rough appearance, not very fitting for the profession, who is stopped and taken to a barracks because he was found in a confused state, where he will be interrogated by Roman Polanski, specifically chosen to mislead the viewer who is not used to considering him as an actor rather than a director. The fact that the film was conceived precisely for the two actors is something I discovered later, though I sensed it right away through the dialectical clash between the two; with various poetic quotations created for the occasion by a French author. All unfolding under the gaze of Sergio Rubini in the role of the policeman who compiles the report between the two.
Warned (as much as the viewer) by the figure of the commissioner, Onoff will begin to contradict himself, in a trivial or perhaps accidental way...immediately realizing he is in an ineffable and unknown context, open to a thousand interpretations, some of which the author would never have absolutely thought, yet nevertheless legitimate.
The great intuition at the base of the film, accompanied by gothic elements, is maintained masterfully even in scenes rooted in rationality, such as the usual phone call granted to the prisoner, who will be able to listen to the interlocutor on the other end of the line, but not make himself heard; or even in the pages of the report that will turn out to be blank and the many pens, all without ink.

Not everything in the film, however, adheres to the rules of art: some sequences related to the writer's photography hobby seem disconnected from the plot; while some shots, from inside a toilet or under the typewriter, viewed as useless virtuosity, suit it.
A theatrical subject, also, that Kafka would have liked; interspersed with fragments of images (in many cases single frames) shown in rapid sequence as flashbacks; a mystery, which also presents an occult sub-theme, so to speak: revealed by the director, but absolutely unintelligible in my opinion, and therefore I do not report. A film, aside from everything, unmissable, which in its intuition inspired several Hollywood productions, which gained a wider following despite being infinitely inferior.