Paolo Sorrentino
This Must Be The Place

It's the usual story: you go to the cinema, too full of expectations, sit down enthusiastic, with the names of the human beings who produced what you are about to watch in mind (Sorrentino, damn, "Il Divo" was a great movie, Sean Penn, too, what can you say about him?), the film starts and you begin to focus your attention only on the images, the scenes, what the screen conveys to you. But after about half an hour, maybe a little more, you feel that annoying, almost incessant sensation rising from your stomach, that makes you understand that not everything is going as you hoped. You almost find yourself begging for things to change sooner or later, for everything you see to turn into something better, because damn, after all, you're facing a production that's not just some holiday comedy... but things don't change.

Sorrentino directs a banal story, one that's been seen many times before; a journey in search of oneself, and he does it poorly, with flat direction that never takes off, a bit boring, sometimes insecure. Sean Penn transforms into a declining rock star, Cheyenne, oppressed by his past but still going around as if he were a hybrid between a bad copy of Robert Smith of The Cure and Marilyn Manson. The usual misfit who feels like an outcast but wants to react. And he does so by hunting down the Nazi tormentor who mistreated his father in the Auschwitz concentration camp, a frankly ridiculous script idea that adds nothing to the flatness of the story (the images of the piled-up corpses in Auschwitz wink at a third-grade sensationalism). In the midst of this hunt, as if it weren't enough, stories upon stories intertwine, pieces of life that the rock star encounters along the way, making a film that already started off badly seem confusing and inconclusive.

There is no lack of high-level acting, Sean Penn does a great job, even though at times he gives the effect of being monotonous (his wonderful half-ironic, half-grotesque little laugh) and he manages not to overshadow those who support him (the chubby boy singing "This Must Be The Place" by the Talking Heads is a revelation, perhaps the best scene in the whole film), but the actors cannot save a screenplay that had the potential to be appreciated in its intentions but in practice reduced everything to a jumble of confused and never deepened elements.

The cameo by David Byrne, the author of the soundtrack, is practically useless, almost annoying, akin to a predictable ending that turns the protagonist's existential parable into a hymn to revenge. And so you leave the cinema sighing in disappointment, with only Chayenne's bright red lipstick and his horrid Dr. Martens on your mind.