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Rating:
After the last short film ends, one reflects, but ultimately the poignancy of this rare melancholic idyll on instinct, impulses, and love is realized: everything ultimately leads to a reevaluation of that sentiment that a century of cinema has fed us in its dramatic attire, leaving behind a proselytism of “easy tears” to renounce and pity…
Agosti forges a very courageous work, delving deeply into the outskirts of Parma in '83—an “environment red” that positively influenced the outcome of the project—on a quest to find people (chosen “non-conventionally”) willing to exchange a one-on-one reflection with the journalist on the meaning and need for affection, tenderness, and often even pleasure.
Subjects are left to the total openness of their soul, to visions generated by indecipherable hormonal influences, never dissembling in translating their own body language logistically, yet hesitating (which is normal) to explicitly comply with the interlocutor seeking the most direct questions to share with them the anecdotes of consciousness.
Love, relationship, physical union always have negative connotations and outcomes: each of the 7—especially the transsexual and the teacher—has an ego subjugated by institutions, those institutions (often Christian) that impose the demonization and sense of guilt for straying from prescribed norms into the psyche. The sexual relationship is an easy fallback to existential resignation - and this is the case for the prostitute Anna - so far from the socially administered precepts that persevering in the act ends up choking to the core and killing. It is an imaginary daily escape that begins already in childhood - Little Frank: < At school you can't play, you can't make love!> - where a slightly shrewder soul refuses to comply with the concealment of sex, and at 9-10 years old engages in discovering and exploring without restraints or inhibitions: because pleasure must not remain a mystery, if there is something that can dampen frustrations and reveal new ecstasy and delight, then it is worth nurturing it from the authoritarian eye that seeks to suppress all desire. Again, the Relationship, in the only positive story—the one of the gay Lola—becomes in its most mature version a sort of esoteric identification with nature and the divine, pleasure and escape chase each other in a philanthropic spiral whose acumen is a recurring orgasm over the Creator and things…
An hour and a half that slides by leaving a profound lump of emotion and horror; Agosti at times instrumentalizes, at times (we must admit) treads paths that prick and compromise a detailed resolution on the testimonies of personalities already dulled by a four-eye confession with the camera, but it is undeniable the intrinsic quality of perspectives on tenderness and pleasure that perhaps we will never have the opportunity to know and grasp even in real life...
A unique, in every sense
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