Author's judgement: 
There is an archaic but effective way of saying: when it's thrushes and when it's crickets. You can use Italian cinema verbatim: you go from legitimate acclaim for a film like Dogman by Matteo Garrone to the doubts that arise when you see other works where it is difficult to understand the reason, the productive sense, which nevertheless somehow emerges at the end of the screening. We are, once again, faced with a suspended judgment.
This is precisely the case with Hotel Gagarin, written and directed by Simone Spada, at his debut in large-scale distribution and with a significant professional history behind him. The story is very simple: it begins with an all-Italian story that concerns the cinema market. An "honorable" is able to pilot a project for the making of a bogus film, with the sole purpose of appropriating undue financing and then sharing the loot with an accomplice. To this end, it is necessary to set up a crew, a cast, actors, etc. and bizarre and desperate characters join together. A sort of Brancaleone army leaves for Armenia, people who leave behind "the Saturday night war on the Via Pontina" and, once they arrive in the snowy lands, things will not go quite as imagined and the ending will be bittersweet. The cast is made up of capable and proven actors: Claudio Amendola, Luca Argentero, Giuseppe Battiston, Barbora Bobulova, Silvia D'Amico and with a significant appearance by Philippe Leroy who give it their all, but good will alone is not enough. The director knows his work well and masters the camera with poise and ability but, unfortunately, he wanted to extend his awareness excessively and in fact the screenplay, always his own invention, is often ungrammatical: it is difficult to do very different professions well.
The film contains another film: we talk about cinema for complex and controversial aspects. For example, the public funding mechanism for cinematographic works which is not always clear in its purpose. Then, in the course of the story, we enter into the substance of what it is or what it should be, or what cinema can mean for many people: the representation or possible realization of a dream. And, in this second part of the film and precisely in this context, its most interesting part emerges, where the dreamlike dimension of people's desires can find space in its vision on the big screen. It is a film conceptually far from Rome, the corrupt and infected capital, the city of great beauty and great ugliness, of Cinecittà and the ring road. It is a film that would also like to be comical but fails to do so and, kindly, resolves itself into a little drama.
Hotel Gagarin however it deserves attention both for the narrative cue and because Spada - we hope - will be able to give us pleasant surprises in the future. Don't miss the end credits: an excellent summary of the film, where everything and everyone is framed, in their dreams and in their reality, more or less exactly as it happens in real life for many of us.
