Poetic cinema and a poet's story: both difficult challenges in the cinema. On the one hand, the rarefied aesthetics of Davide Ferrario who with NUOVO CINEMA PARALITICO privileges the places on the margins with respect to great events and, on the other, IL BAD POET the biopic by Gianluca Jodice on the autumn of the life of Gabriele D'Annunzio (interpreted by Sergio Castellitto), when the poet preferred the twilight in order not to see his body offended by time.
Now Ferrario's film, already out of competition at the 38th edition of the Torino Film Festival, arrives in theaters at the Anteo in Milan, while the trailer arrives for IL CATTIVO POETA while the film will be in cinemas from 20 May distributed by 01.
Gabriele D'Annunzio was an uncomfortable, unpredictable type, "a decayed tooth that is either pulled out or covered with gold" as in the trailer for Jodice's film that tells the artist-esthete and man of action's last years , when its long shadow somehow still frightened fascism.
We are in 1936 and Giovanni Comini (played by Francesco Patanè), the youngest federal in Italy - and this thanks to his mentor, Achille Starace, secretary of the Fascist Party and number two of the regime - is summoned to Rome for a delicate mission: supervise Gabriele D'Annunzio and put him in a position to do no harm.
In fact, Mussolini fears it could damage his imminent alliance with Hitler's Germany. But the Duce did not take into account the charm of the poet, so that at the Vittoriale Comini's political plan will begin to waver and the young federal will find himself torn between loyalty to the Party and admiration for the poet.
Shaved head and white jacket, D'Annunzio knows very well that he is being controlled, spied on, but his vanity still pushes him to fascinate this young inexperienced boy.
In Comini's unpublished papers we can clearly read how Starace had asked him to gag the poet: "With twisted but understandable words - writes Comini -, he hinted at the continuous progress of the Commander's physical decadence, which could lead him towards a dangerous inability to understand, with disastrous consequences also on the political level ". In short, the clear intention was to bring down on D'Annunzio the shadow of an incipient semi-insanity, but Comini did not lend himself to this game so as to reveal to the poet himself the task he had received.
THE BAD POET was filmed almost entirely inside the Vittoriale and then in Brescia, Nespi and Rome where D'Annunzio died on March 1, 1938 at the age of 74. In the cast also Tommaso Ragno, Clotilde Courau and Fausto Russo Alesi.
In NEW CINEMA PARALITICO by Ferrario, on the other hand, it is minimalist and unshelled poetry. The protagonist and guide of these small one and a half minute microfilms is the poet Franco Arminio who recites unsolicited poems in the most unlikely places, not least in a barber shop. The formal rule of this original work by Ferrario, which also explains its title, is the 'paralysis' of the camera that moves only on its axis. In short, the lens is aimed at a square and expects what happens "a bit as if one were going hunting", explains the director himself.
And so in the documentary by Ferrario, director, screenwriter, writer and film critic born in 1956, there are images of a four-star hotel in Caserta, behind the scenes of a concert in the square, images of a village market. In the sign that "large dimensions distract", NUOVO CINEMA PARALITICO moves in the small, works on the margins.
The cult phrase of the film and its true manifesto, the one that Franco Arminio reads in front of the ruins: "God is not dead, he just fired us. Poetry serves to make us summarize, poetry is our union".
