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Sunday evening, almost midnight. The streets of the little town in Brianza are deserted, the air is crisp. There were nine of us in the theater, thanks to the restrictions, but three were volunteer kids who, after tearing the tickets, perched in the back rows to rewatch the film. On the battered wall of the street opposite the oratory, the generational writing "Produce, consume, die." We make our way to the car, right in front of the graffiti, and for once in my life, I'm not sure I know what to think of what I just saw.
No one can say it's not beautiful to watch, no one can say there aren't intense moments, rich characters, beautiful songs, lots of music, suggestive choreography. The two hours and forty minutes fly by quickly (so to speak), there's not a moment of tiredness, sometimes your eyes pop at the kaleidoscopes of colorful skirts spinning frantically on the screen, at the intertwining bodies, at the protagonists' overflowing energy. The breasts and smiles, the urban settings and dance halls, stolen kisses and big knives.
Yet, I must have pulled out my cell phone ten times to check the score of Atalanta-Inter. And I never felt guilty for missing a few seconds of artistic chaos. No. Maybe I really don't fully understand the genre, maybe I implicitly treat this senile Spielberg with indifference. Or maybe not. Maybe I unintentionally sensed the flaw in the subject and the further shortcoming in the remake.
The musical lives on grand canvases, loose plots that ask to leave space for dancing, for songs. And when the young guy falls in love, it calls for a nice piece, when the girl hints that she's into it, another one... It goes on like this, with large thematic blocks that ultimately dilute a bit of the narrative's intensity. You might say that in such a film you can't do without the choreography, the songs. True, we agree. But then here something is wrong if repeatedly my hand went to check if someone had scored.
The concept of mannerism comes to mind. Old Steven doesn't feel the need to say anything essentially new, different, or current compared to what was done in the film sixty years ago. It's a movie from 1961 in essence, from 2021 only in form, in colors, in definition. In technique, in short. A technical-technological update that has not a comma to add to this immortal story. And so maybe, even without being a fan of the genre and not knowing the other film well, I sensed in those lush choreographies an absence of freshness, because they are all hinged on music and themes that have already had sixty years to settle.
In cinema, it can't just be a simple ballet that wins you over. That's not enough. There needs to be strength in vision, there needs to be a brilliant intuition, almost a psychological violence in capturing the look, greedy but aloof, of those in the theater. Here, all this is missing. Everything is extremely reassuring and predictable: even death, even tragedy. Because the author no longer has the hunger, doesn't have the nerves to amaze and disturb his beloved and pampered audience.
If a director, a man who should observe the world before narrating it through images, does not feel the need to update a story after all these decades, but focuses only on aesthetics (in the most frivolous sense) and technique (the direction is exquisite, it must be said), well then I think he has stopped looking around and now just looks at himself in the mirror. "How beautiful I am."
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