Those Happy Years

The Film Society of Lincoln Center presented the 2014 edition of Open Roads from June 5-12 including 16 productions of which 13 were U.S. Premieres.  Compared to past Open Roads programs, the festival offered more documentaries and features embracing a documentary approach. It carried Gianfranco Rossi’s Sacro GRA, the first documentary receiving the Golden Lion for best film at Venice and Alberto Fasulo’s   crossover TIR, a feature documenting everyday life of a foreign truck driver in Italy which received first price at the last Rome film festival.

Open Roads has establishes itself over the last 13 tears as the most important U.S. showcase of Italian cinema, programming the best recent Italian productions not shown here before.  Most of its films drew a large audience in sold out performances.  Undoubtedly New York’s demographics help since close to 700,000 New Yorkers are of Italian origin, constituting the largest white ethnic group.  Further, a large number of discounted tickets are sold through the Film Society of Lincoln Center which has thousands of members, probably the largest film society in the United States. 

There were numerous significant selections. In A STREET IN PALERMO by Emma Dante, a well-known theater director, two cars get stuck heading down a run-down narrow street in a slummy Palermo neighborhood. Dante provides an outstanding portrait of the passengers and the residents of the community where the immobile cars are. We have a lesbian couple beset by their own conflicts in one car and an aged widow grandmother Samira with her family in the other. She is told by her son that pride does not allow them to budge. An ensuing traffic jam adds to the atmosphere as does the local petty mafia criminals betting on the winner of the impasse and the colorful depiction of family members and residents. The stage of the alley provides the setting for the night long standoff which ends only when family members discover that Samira had died behind the wheel. In SACRO GRA, filmed over several years, Gianfranco Rosi succeeds in faithfully reflecting in this semi-ethnographic documentary the diversity and fragments of the lives of the people living on the margins of the superhighway Grande Raccordo Anulare which encircles Rome.  Chance encounters result in unobtrusive compelling portraits including people from all walks of life such as an ambulance driver, a fisherman, an eccentric millionaire, tenants of a housing projects and an engineer turned botanist tracking the demise of palm trees attacked by bugs without being able to find a remedy.  For Rosi, who is considered to be one of Italy’s most important documentary filmmakers, this gradual destruction serves as a metaphor for the demise of communities next to the SACRO; yet he admires the strong sense of identity of the people he encountered there.

Rosi Fasulo explores in the Italian Croatian co-production TIR (Transit International Routier) the everyday existence and problems of migrant labor in Europe as reflected by long distance truck drivers coming from Eastern Europe.  In this fiction feature written and filmed by Fasulo there is only one professional actor, Branko Zavrsan, in the role of the former Bosnian teacher Branko who has become a tractor trailer driver because he cannot support his family as a teacher. The script is based on exhaustive research Fasulo had carried out on the European trucking industry and Marko’s work and problems are based on an actual driver’s story.  Through the documentary-style reflection of Marko’s life the audience is educated about the strains and dehumanizing impact of migrant labor, one of Fasulo’s goals. The drivers have no control over their work, are disconnected from their families, work in utter isolation, and have neither connection to communities nor bonds to the countries they work in.  I think that the TIR production is an excellent expression of documentary neo-realism.

Vincenso Marra offers with THE ADMINISTRATOR a charming and compelling portrait of the Naples building administrator Umberto and his extraordinary ability to resolve or dampen conflicts he encounters with and among the residents of the buildings he is responsible for, ranging from the very poor to the rich. He combines his management acumen with psychotherapeutic skills and believes that the mentality shared by people in Naples is amenable to problem solving compromises. Marra introduces the audience to the everyday lives of the residents, to their foibles and obsessions overriding the impact of the Italian economic crisis. The administrator’s upbeat message is that no matter what happens we will manage to survive.

 A different take on the background crises is offered by the feature I CAN QUIT WHENEVER by Sydney Sibilla which was a commercial and critical hit in Italy due to its fast moving plot, great professional cast and satiric approach to middle class living.   We receive insights into academic  corruption, the Italian drug trade, prostitution,  impotence of the police forces  with a colorful storyline tracking the rise into wealth and luxury living and decline into poverty and prison by several brilliant academics who cannot make a living at the university. The chemist among them develops a drug and the others use their skills to market and sell it. Since this new drug is not illicit, they are successful beyond belief and embrace the high life....until the law catches up with them.

Based on interviews with gay Italians and archival material Gianni Amelio offers in HAPPY TO BE DIFFERENT an oral history project presenting the life of members of that community over a forty year period through the early 80’s.  Because these are highly individuated accounts the documentary stays on the personal level and does not offer a systemic or contextual analysis of the factors driving Italian homophobia during that period.  Still, the production is an important chronicle since it shares otherwise inaccessible reflections by prominent Italian gays and intriguing archival footage.

As in past editions Open Roads introduces the best of contemporary Italian Cinema to a discerning New York audience, though it remains to be seen if these films will be successful in other venues.

Claus Mueller

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