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Rating: Well yes... I admit I couldn't resist, like a curious teenager, dazed by the pros and cons like a political debate about Sorrentino’s film, I sprawled on the couch with chips, beer, and enjoyed watching the film on TV right after its Oscar debut. After the first hour, I held up well, then I let myself slip into the arms of Morpheus a bit, and finally, I came back for the last part and the very long funeral finale on the Tiber flowing slowly.
Let's be honest right away: Sorrentino, for musical choices, football and cinematic tastes, is a good son of the 80s. And there is nothing wrong with that, indeed I am too, even if in my nostalgic reviews I lean more towards Neapolitan tears for the end of the 70s. And so the cut of the film, despite the good writing intentions, is very much like a music video, a prestigious long and disjointed music video with excellent photography, a glossy editing, and camera movements that are never trivial and pseudo visionary or lysergic—even though sometimes I found them a bit gaudy, like the upside-down shot of people dancing in the club. But even this might have been done on purpose, almost materializing Jep’s uncertainties, the protagonist, almost telling us: instead of a great intellectual masturbation wouldn't a great blank page have been better?
But then, what does this appealing and spiritual, degraded and beautiful, jovial and austere, vulgar and nostalgic Rome that the director and collaborators want to present to us mean? In the sense that in all this attention to detail, photography, screenplay, waste of money and celluloid—144 minutes in times of crisis! do not then explain the lapses in style in the casting, soundtrack, the prolixity for its own sake of certain scenes and editing...
In the end, you wonder if they are serious or joking. Intellectual pretensions and poses are fine with me, the learned quotes embedded in the sharp dialogues too, but then you have Ferilli’s blank expression with the improbable name of Ramona (?!) playing the stripper who then covers herself in bed with Jep not to show her breasts. It's unnatural; does someone who strips cover themselves in front of their lover? Weird. And Servillo, yes, he’s good, but why does he have to mimic Totò in Misery and Nobility with that mumbling Neapolitan accent like a fallen baron. And even Ferrari, another icy and anti-erotic muse, why? She’s not expressive, she doesn’t break through the screen. At this point, the disorientation was total. It was no longer clear if a message was intended, or if it was meant to be a world movie about Rome. Also, bringing Venditti out of the cellar: what does an old-time singer have to do with today’s Rome? And then the much-vaunted Roman landscape: magic could have been found in other places too—like the Malagrotta landfill for example, or in the outskirts where the true essence of certain Romanity is found, rather than in those clichéd postcard places for the few old Hollywood critics of the foreign film department...Good Iaia Forte, even Vignola as Dadina, the careerist dwarf but philosopher, and the always great Verdone, in the role of Romano with the little mustache between the pimp the off poet; what tenderness to see Pamela Villoresi again, do you remember her my old folks in the drama Marco Visconti? In short, the film will continue to be talked about, and enjoys this fake aura of ellipticity. But do we want to talk about Sorrentino grinning in the commercial at the end of the film? It's like saying here we don't waste time, the Oscar must be struck while it’s hot: with the claim of selling us a new Italian miracle with Marchionne's Fiat 500, a Swiss citizen moving Fiat away doesn’t make it all sound very fake? Ps.
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