Samuele Bersani
Cinema Samuele

Can a song lighten up a period of crisis? Perhaps not, but it can certainly help you face the day. That’s what happened 5 weeks ago, when at 4 in the morning I first listened to Harakiri, the first single of the album. It was love at first listen that soon ignited into a fire: the story of a man who has failed in everything and no longer finds a reason to live but who miraculously and strangely manages to escape his situation; that man could potentially be me, in the midst of a difficult moment, completely shattered and desperate. This song came like the wolf in the fairy tale: just when I was about to give up, the song told me "look, I know you're desperate but somehow you will manage."

Can a song know you better than everyone else (even yourself) and map your current situation? Highly unlikely but not impossible. Yet it happened to me with Pixel, a long and painful track. I don't know how and when Samuele wrote the lyrics of this song, but he captured in a frighteningly perfect and brutal way what I experienced last year: a creative crisis that irreversibly blocked my desire to write and an emotional crisis that led me to end a toxic and unmanageable relationship badly. And then came Covid and what we all know, which revived my desire to write. The song synthesizes these two moments of my life, placing the past filled with creative and emotional crisis in the chorus (so to speak) and the present in the verses, where men with bronze eyes oxidized under the weather walk by, streets abandoned after eight o'clock, and the mixer from which a voice sadder than before must pass.

Can a song metaphorically slap you and make you stop worrying about the past? Definitely yes, indeed there are many songs that convey this message. But no one has said it as bluntly and precisely as Samuele did in Il tuo ricordo: a battle between the past, poisonous and sure that pushes us to give in to it, and the present. Listening brought to mind Heraclitus' theory of the struggle of opposites, where it's hypothesized that inside us there's a continuous war in which one side is destined to win and the other to lose; this small philosophical pill learned years ago on school benches came in handy to understand the meaning of the track itself: although the past constantly persuades us by showing how happy we previously were, it is always and only the present that wins and governs our destiny.

Can a song take you elsewhere and make you see the lives of other people? Yes, even though today there are very few songs of this kind. An example of a song that takes you to see the lives of other people can be Le Abbagnale, a love story between two girls so different from each other yet like sisters, or L'intervista, which also talks about how journalism is "prostituting" itself to certain artists just to sell a few more magazines, or even Harakiri itself.

In conclusion, can a pessimistic album aware of the period we are living through succeed in being a form of encouragement not to give up on what we all call life? It seems absurd, but yes; and Samuele Bersani's Cinema Samuele, with its lucid and not banal realism, succeeds in an extraordinary way.