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Rating: Nino Russo - "The Day of the Assumption" (1977)
A lunar farce, an apology for cinema or an alternate history of Italy? This film by Nino Russo, due to some strange astral alignment, occasionally gravely appears on private TVs, and it is not available on laserdisc, VHS, DVD, DVX, streaming, and the like. Shot with limited means, by a forced neorealist..., 2 actors, entirely outdoors, it finds in the landscape and in the minimal photography a sort of ecological niche that makes it wander in those niche TVs that bring out these small pearls. And thank goodness for these small broadcasters, not swallowed by the networks of the little dwarf, by films with mega effects, and ads every minute: the plot...
The protagonists, a film director and a professor, on the day of the Assumption, that is Ferragosto, do not return to their homes in Southern Italy, nasty term eh?—and they wander through the deserted streets of Rome as if in a perverse ritual, which gives the impression it happens every year; they travel from the center to reach a sci-fi suburb of alien, lunar-looking dormitory buildings: one of the two—Tino Schirinzi—constantly pontificates on Italian history with learned citations from Guicciardini, wistfully imagining Naples as the capital of the south, and America, N.Y., as an ideal homeland for the working and peasant classes of the south: then, after exposing his knowledge, amidst dumps and ruins, he robotically retrieves old tape players from his backpack to listen to songs-lullabies from the 60s, until he elicits the irritated reaction of his travel companion, played by Leopoldo Trieste, who starts stomping on the infernal devices.
The magnetic tapes constitute a sort of suitcase of dreams, of a collective memory now emptied, made alienating like the urban landscape: it is the prelude—we are in '77, to that socio-economic degradation that will characterize the 80s-90s. The disintegration begins right from the analog musical automations, testimonies of the mythologized economic boom that now reveals its true face, from Schirinzi's mantra on the alternate history of Italy, and from the slow gaze, almost ofidian and prehistoric, of the camera on a futuristic, cemented, and alienating Roman suburb, that of the Corviale and the eco-monsters, of the excellent management of public affairs by the unfortunate administrations of the time, with no social fabric, no more roots, made of deported families, marginalized, new Martians, drugs and droogs. The appearance in the final scene of the fool and the town band at Villa Borghese is a mirage, an even further nostalgic call to a rural south that is no longer there; "there's no stopping now, today, we should've thought of it 20, 30 years ago" declares the hallucinated Schirinzi.
How much more honest is Russo in this painful little film compared to the documentary styles of nanimoretti in "Caro diario", which pretends to be a social critique in the upscale neighborhoods of Casalpalocco, but in the end merely talks about his bourgeois dreams of a penthouse on Corso Francia, and has the paid extra say that Spinaceto is beautiful. But you go there, I would have made him say!
Once upon a time, there was Ferragosto in empty big cities, with closed shops, closed museums, and hypochondriacs, the poor and vacationless ruled, reinventing the holiday on condominium terraces and scattered small bars; the schools, still far from the Calvinist fury of productivity, would start on October first...slow rhythms, prehistoric summers, like saurians in the sun, now extinct. Regrets? a little yes; but "there's no stopping now, now more than ever".
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