Matteo Rovere
Il primo re

This is a Valhalla Rising that didn't quite make it, but for the state of Italian cinema, it is still a beautiful, memorable film, in its own way. It doesn't excel because it doesn't choose to take a well-defined path and alternates between rarefied, mystical moments and more plainly epic ones, complete with emphatic duels and thundering music.

If the darker parts are convincing and surprising for their credibility, the others smell of fragile emulation, genre clichés, with always very schematic and repetitive fights and killings. Rovere is particularly invested in the concept of genre film and after Veloce come il vento, he attempts an equally high leap. The car races came out a bit better than the sword and axe duels, that's for sure.

The heart of Il primo re is smeared with mud, immersed in the mystical mists of Lazio almost three thousand years ago. The more desolate and barren the environment, the more characters like the Remo of the grand Alessandro Borghi (or once, Mads Mikkelsen in Viking lands) gain in charisma. For this reason, the film breaks through especially in the first half, when a handful of former slaves find themselves having to survive in the swamps, without food, with a dying Romulus believed cursed for touching the vestal. There, Remo's strength seems able to bend the world and is expressed in episodes of exquisite ferocity, free from any constraint, vital.

But then the ferocity becomes more political, and the narrative loses a bit of its magic touch, having to reconnect with the myth of the founding of Rome and fratricide. The beauty is somewhat weakened, also due to the, in my opinion, inexplicable choice of having the characters speak in proto-Latin. Our characters mumble an incomprehensible language, which only makes it less immediate for the viewer, especially when (unfortunately) the dialogue becomes more dense.

There is no sense in having them express themselves in a language that no one in the world speaks; it's a stick in the wheels of the narrative without any collateral advantage. Historical accuracy is purely self-serving (it's a bit of a pose, let's be honest) because the realism of the language (still to be proven, since the film's language was "recreated" by scholars) has the grave counterbalance of a total unrealism in acting: actors are forced to speak a language none of them knows, and viewers are made to listen to speeches none of them can understand.

The ending also didn't convince me, especially due to the rushed timing with which Romulus recovers from near-death and then goes on to kill a brother bursting with vigor. In short, Rovere was clearly in love with the first part, but at some point, he had to wrap it up, and you can really feel the haste in closing without leaving significant traces.

But this is normal, because it's a work of aesthetics, of surface (in the best sense of the term) and not so much a matter of content. They are Romulus and Remus, but they could have been any two other heroes. What mattered to the director was mainly making his wild, primitive, fierce film, with an evident infatuation with certain great foreign examples. The use of natural light is another considerable sign of devotion.

6.5/10