Paolo Genovese
The Place

The classic case of overreaching. The success of Perfetti sconosciuti seems to have gone to Paolo Genovese's head, who certainly did a good job then, but can't yet be considered a great director, let alone a great screenwriter.

The Place is inspired by the series tv The Booth at the End, which I haven’t seen, and it’s certainly interesting in its preliminary moments. A man, seated at a table in a café, listens to people's desires and proposes actions for them to undertake, in exchange for the realization of these aspirations.

A structure of drawers and intersections that can certainly fascinate, initially: much like in the previous film, the chorus of characters appearing on stage presents a jagged humanity, disappointed, envious, mean. But unlike that, the new work exceeds in quantity and therefore inevitably (or rather, due to inability or lack of care) falls in the quality of the sketched profiles.

Because ultimately the perspectives of the two films are opposite: in Perfetti sconosciuti, the focus was on the unspoken, the secrets and subterfuges of people considered “normal”; here the same normal people go to the café and expose all their interiority, giving the viewer everything at once, thus eliminating much of the inherent charm in their ordinary lives. It is much more interesting to discover the small and large hypocrisies of people via SMS and WhatsApp than to have them told directly, without any filter.

Contributing to this decline is the writing of the dialogues themselves: feelings, reflections, and stories unfold in a linear, almost crude manner, and in the end, more than characters, those who sit at the table seem like puppets, mere diegetic functions. The nun seeking God, the mechanic wanting to spend a night with the model, the alcoholic father and his son who repudiates him, the dissatisfied woman wanting to make her husband jealous, the elderly lady with a sick husband, the blind man who wants to see. With the blind man wanting to regain sight, the breaking point is reached, emblematic of the senselessness of this grand narrative structure.

Some sensible reflections on humanity eventually surface, but it's truly scant compared to the effort to erect such a scaffold. One is almost more absorbed by the intertwining of the different paths than by their real urgency in terms of universal meanings. But even the intersections and the more intense twists (few, actually) are diluted in the truly simplistic narratives of the characters. And the direction is content to just observe, when it should have focused more on extreme close-ups, minimal gestures, proxemics, and postures.

The actors certainly aren’t the problem, but they didn’t leave me with much, so confined in narrow, two-dimensional figures. Mastrandrea holds his own but even his character didn’t convince me: the initial armor of cynicism is blatantly exaggerated and not genuine, and when it gives way, even a little, to humanity, it feels disappointing and saccharine.

There it is, the saccharine element: the film that intended to reveal the monster in each of us loses almost all of its corrosive edge in the final phase, which marks an almost conciliatory opening, like a feel-good national popular ending.

5+/10