Robert Altman
America Oggi

THE REVIEW

Bigger than two years under the radar, you’ve undressed her hundreds of times watching from a respectful distance; your hands know better than hers the curves of her back, the line of her breast, the profile of her face, and those dimples that drive you wild. That pillow in your hands as if it was her, exactly her, who had finally stumbled, somehow, into your bed full of hormones and frustrations. Same streets, same city, but company and age irreparably different. That minimal temporal distance is sadistically deceitful, because two years at thirty mean nothing, but in the middle of adolescence, they are a wall with barbed wire and guns ready to fire. And so, you have no choice but to watch her from afar; you don’t even talk to her, and you consume yourself with pain until, with the decisive shove of changing schools, you forget her and let the memory fade among the bittersweet memories. A decade later you see her again and with a black metal drum set in place of your heart, you try to approach with a determined step. Everything that had reignited in a flash, like the dry "click" of a switch, shuts down definitely: that adolescent dream, in fact, by opening her beautiful mouth, teleported you to the nearest port, as if you were flirting with the most classic and stereotypical dock worker.

It’s not uncommon for expectations, especially those particularly longed for over time, to be unmet. Not always, luckily.

Freely adapted from the best works of one of my favorite authors, the minimalist Raymond Carver, "Short Cuts" enjoys a particularly solid backbone on which Robert Altman could work calmly, laying on top a ton of minutes (180!). The production, evidently with very few budgetary constraints, allowed the director to lead a cast composed of a couple of lines of Hollywood stars. I say a couple of lines and I do not exaggerate: I wouldn’t even need to use Arial 24 to fill them. In the script phase, the stories were subject to a couple of sharp scissors and needle and thread. Such tampering with the writings could be, by itself, a sufficient reason to cause irritating itching, sand in the sheets, ethyl alcohol in the eyes (apparently the latest trend among the younger).

That said, I must admit I really enjoyed the way Altman artfully tied together what was originally separate; the visual rendering surprisingly approached what I had imagined while leafing through the stories. "Short Cuts" is a film that, apart from clothes and hair, has aged very well: the ruthless photograph of a complex society largely decaying, narcissistic, mean, selfish, and yet hopeful and fragile, constantly searching for the necessary balance to face the everyday problems imposed by the frantic pace. Excluding one episode, violence is not directly analyzed, but that doesn’t mean the cynical coldness of many scenes isn’t a predominant color in Altman’s picture. A gloomy tint largely without appeal.

Twenty years ago, the issues exposed might have seemed related only to a marginal, metropolitan part of our country. Now, leafing through a newspaper any day of the week, we can realize how the invisible common denominator that connects the lives of the protagonists of "Short Cuts" finds resonance, albeit not so extreme, even in our provincial everyday life. It’s a high-level cinematic work capable of not dulling the expectations I had nurtured before watching it. I’m allergic to particularly long works, but in this case, the three hours flew by quickly thanks to the fluidity of the plot, the rhythm of the film, and the skill of the cast, who paraphrased in images the prose of a great author.

In the unlikely event you haven’t watched it yet, I invite you to do so.