An existential, lysergic, dark, hopeless, but completely engaging noir, this 'Dostoevsky', a Sky Original TV series, conceived, written and directed by Fabio and Damiano D'Innocenzo, premiered at the 74th edition of the Berlin Film Festival in the Berlinale Special section , and will soon arrive at the cinema with Vision Distribution.
"We wanted to tell the story of the winter of a human being by intercepting the flavours, the scents, a melancholic winter that never ends.
And this with an archetype, that of the detective, but completely stripped down. We also wanted to talk about the possibility of a change, that is to be able to choose what to become" says Fabio D'Innocenzo today in Berlin.
'The Man in Winter' of this six-episode series shot mostly on a Lazio coast "that looks like Alabama" stars Filippo Timi (Vincere, The Eight Mountains) in the role of Enzo Vitello, a tormented detective with a painful past and who uses drugs to avoid disappearing completely.
"A policeman with a broken past and an inevitable future, who finds himself investigating the blood trail of a ruthless serial murderer, nicknamed Dostoevsky due to the letters full of macabre details that he leaves at the crime scenes" is how the directors themselves talk about the history.
A man who lives in an isolated and dilapidated house on the river with a daughter Ambra (a very good Carlotta Gamba) who he had sent away in the past for an extraordinary and unspeakable reason without giving away spoilers.
Obsessed by the words of the serial killer, Vitello's madness grows, his task is no longer an investigation, but a sort of descent into hell full of demons.
"A policeman and a murderer, both intangible, elusive, ghosts, who proceed in the dark in the darkness of conscience, who hunt each other but also caress, dissecting together a solitude that absorbs and encompasses everything. In short, Dostoevsky follows the investigation most complex of all: the real crime is living" say the two Roman directors.
In short, a story of the 'last': "Which is more congenial to us and which when we abandoned it for a middle-class story (Latin America? Ed.) it didn't work".
The cast of the Sky Studios production with Paco Cinematografica also includes Gabriel Montesi (Favolacce, Siccità, Romulus, Christian) and Federico Vanni (Chiara Lubich - Love Conquers All, I Am the Abyss).
A film full of apodictic phrases and cursed scenes (above all a colonoscopy in the foreground undergone by Timi) in which there is obviously an absence of judgement: "Of course we must not fall into the trap of judgement, this is also our beauty, we are already in a dictatorship of thoughts" underlines Damiano D'Innocenzo.
Of course, an 'absence of judgement' is needed, says Timi: "But for me it's not a problem. After having worked so hard on Shakespeare, let go of any judgement. And then you tell it to me who already stammers and can't see a damn thing, so if I have to I'll throw myself into making a narrative that goes against the trend even if I'm pissed off."
And the actor says again: "The D'Innocenzos are fantastic, but they don't give you any indications. I then understood that I had to be profound and fragile at the same time and I immediately thought of Carmelo Bene who said that the actor is the femininity brought to conscience. What enlightened and supported me was a phrase from D'Innocenzo read in the screenplay: 'In the sky a storm as ferocious as a quarrel between brothers'. Finally, the two directors were already at the Berlinale on their debut with La land of enough, presented in the Panorama section in 2018, and then with Favolacce, in competition in 2020, the Silver Bear for Screenplay. Cult phrase from the Dostoevsky series: "I have cured you of the absurd disease of living".
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