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ENEA is a 2023 film presented at the Venice Festival.
It is the second feature film by Pietro Castellitto, son of Sergio who in the film is Celeste, father of Enea, the protagonist-director. Father/son in fiction, as in reality.
There's this family of the Roman upper middle class (roma nòr). The father is a psycho-analyst. The mother, played by Chiara Noschese, is Marina and hosts a cultural TV program, book reviews, something like that.
Enea is the firstborn, a thirty-something smart-ass who runs a sushi restaurant (the chef screws the salmons) and spends his days between the tennis club and private parties in luxurious villas, where among other things he deals cocaine with his friend Valentino (also rich by family), played by Giorgio Quarzo Guarascio.
Finally, the second son, Brenno (Cesare Castellitto), a sixteen-year-old big baby who still sleeps in the big bed with mom and dad.
Enea is the story of a failure, parental above all. Two inept parents who raise two sons who go their own way but don’t go anywhere. It’s a façade family, disjointed, where each one deals (and does it poorly) with their loneliness and uncertainties, in an unresolved acidic mess.
Enea is the story of Enea (really, who'd have guessed) who chases "power" wanting to "win" but hasn’t even received a kick in the ass from life and doesn’t understand a damn thing about life yet. He chases power, beauty (Eva – Benedetta Porcaroli) lives exclusively in the material world, money-alcohol-cocaine-chicks.
Enea is a crime movie, the dealing, the heist, the mess.
It’s a prismatic film, edipal (here women are in the background except for Eva, Enea's girlfriend, the only one who slams the truth in his face) with many shifts in tone, uneven, imperfect, with memorable sequences and dialogues (for example when Giordano the guy who gives coke to Enea speaks, played by Aldo Dionisi). Then there are other negligible moments, unsuccessful, out of place, between the grotesque and the embarrassing, but it is also in these elements that lies the fascination and amazement of this surprising, bourgeois, new-age, baroque work, strongly critical of the world it portrays. It’s clear that the film is personal, I would venture autobiographical, heartfelt.
And it’s when it dives deeper that the level of attention rises, when it moves from the surface of champagne, chicks, coke, to the meaning of life that Enea sees the abyss and darkens, defenseless and puzzled. Unlike his friend Valentino, who has seen these things better and earlier, who flies the plane and the greatest thrill the plane gives him is not the thrill of flight, but the awareness that when he’s up there he could die at any moment. Thus, there are moments of reckoning, awareness, the surface is wiped away, the beast is flayed and it gets to the bone.
The directing setup then is really interesting and takes the film very high; unconventional visual solutions, saturated photography, daring shots (and risings), with the soundtrack by Niccolò Contessa, Spiagge by Renato Zero in karaoke (another significant sequence, sang by Valentino). Followed by other tracks https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27219440/soundtrack/
What else to say? I could continue because in almost two hours, as long as it lasts, the topics and cues covered are not few, but I would stop here.
The film has divided critics and audiences, and for me this aspect is always a small medal of valor, I am among those who say yes, watch it.
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