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Rating: I observe my seat neighbors; what connects the wrinkled lady and the slightly apart forty-something couple on the right is the grimace etched on their faces. Twisted, frowning faces, a mix of disbelief and disgust as if the gutted carcass of an animal had appeared right in the seat next to them. But this instinctive reaction is not directed at the protagonist of "Gli Equilibristi," but at us who are indirectly bombarded by the images.
The film doesn't tell us anything new but has the merit of being able to showcase, with harsh realism, what is often covered up, swept under the rug by the passerby armed with sunglasses, a quick step that disguises a lack of time, a cell phone to fiddle with. I find a bitter taste in my mouth, gastric juice rising and trying to escape. The work captures a common story, but without moralizing, and indirectly delivers a blow to the teeth that, personally, knocked my incisors two rows forward. Fortunately, there was no one there. You observe and realize how laughable and insignificant those that you daily define as the titanic problems of your existence truly are. You follow Giulio's story, the line of that beautiful image from the poster, and like an inexperienced couple of mountaineers on a glacier, you end up following the protagonist in a desperate and ruinous fall. Down into the crevasse.
Giulio doesn’t crash face-first, but the slippery inclined plane he walks on is too much for his legs; the fact that it is not a fall, but a long and inexorable slide does not soothe or make the mud he is soon swallowed by more acceptable. This muck blocks him, makes him struggle and nearly fall. Playing with the title, I could even say everything that makes him lose his balance. Because to make the calculations work out, he would need to become an expert circus performer, a freaking tightrope walker. It is an agony he himself does not want to believe in.
He tries to cling to those feeble and anorexic ropes that the so-called friends throw at him without much conviction, as if to cover their own asses in front of their conscience; the bastard that will knock (even if we don’t see it) in the evening, just before going to bed. But at the first strong tug, those ropes disappear never to return, and so Giulio turns into one of those people he used to feel great pity for.
Mastandrea's performance is outstanding, capable of bringing to film a drama that is often hidden away. The dialogues are not many, but damn are they sharp. A solid work (the director’s name is De Matteo), which very few will go to see and that will not dent the cliché that says Italian cinema is definitively dead, and blah, blah, blah.
"La Pecora Nera" (2010), "Cesare Deve Morire" (2011), "Gli Equilibristi" (2012) just to name three. One thing they have in common: the laughable earnings.
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