Paolo Sorrentino
This is Must Be the place

LA RECENSIONE

Contrary to my friend @HOPELESS, I go to bed early and wake up early. That’s why at six, I was already watching this film, after painting my eyes black and my lips red, which I do every morning like our protagonist has since I was 16 years old.

Sorrentino’s films need to be watched multiple times; too many details, too many subliminal messages cannot be grasped on a first viewing, in fact, 14 years after its release, it proves to be very modern.

Even the first time I saw it, in the middle of my DSTP in 2011, I liked it, but I found one thing very annoying, the dubbing, which is why this morning I watched it in the original language.

Like good wine, this film needed to be decanted to appreciate the content, the photography, the symmetries, and the musical choices. David Byrne’s cameo is a pearl; that’s how I saw him live, a "little" lord, ironic and extremely intelligent.

Sorrentino, born in 1971, is a son of that new wave and an era in the middle ground between the heaviness of the eighties and the lightness of the nineties. The giant shoulder pads, the perm, the makeup, all led us to hide behind masks of existentialism. We gathered in clans to share ideas, love, dance, art, completely detached from the pragmatism of our parents.

The protagonist hadn’t spoken to his father for 30 years, but the funeral shakes him and takes him on a journey where he finds others rather than himself. We are a generation with Daddy Issues, and Cheyenne is no exception. He looks at the world with young eyes even though he is a man, he is upright, doesn’t betray, he is respectful, and above all, loves life and looks at it in the small things... the life that is told is the director’s.

Cheyenne is Sorrentino, perhaps one of the greatest geniuses of world cinema. A man who comes out of success centrifuged and then spat into an era he does not love and that only through his art can try to give US a different perspective. If we watch the film from this perspective, everything makes sense.

Most of us who lived that era abused everything: substances, art, music, concerts, and above all took "journeys" physically and mentally back and forth to that "cursed" music that under our skin imposed and imposes on us.

For years I watched the world from a protected perspective, we "without skin" cannot roam undisturbed, the world is no longer ours, but by living in it, we must know and understand it well to avoid suffering.

This is the essence of the film to preserve beauty and love in the heart, everything else is boredom.

Let’s all return pure as Cheyenne teaches us.