When you are in a public place, but also in a family occasion, try to freeze the image and observe how many people are connected, talking or holding a mobile phone. Or, if you notice someone around you abusing Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, etc., try to tell them if they don't consider the time dedicated to socializing through their mobile phone excessive rather than the time dedicated to more direct, frontal human relationships, looking into each other's eyes. There does not seem to be any more doubts about the new social, cultural, anthropological dimension that all of humanity has been going through since the first mobile telecommunications devices, commonly understood as "cell phones", appeared on the planet and there are not a few who believe that we are close to a new pathology of drug addiction where instead of a substance there is the transmission frequency.
In the cinema, the theme has been raised well by the well-known film by Paolo Genovese "Perfect Strangers" where the protagonists were adults grappling not so much with the tricks of technological fate, but more with their concrete relationship difficulties.
Federico Moccia's film talks about all this “Non c'è campo”, just released in Italian cinemas. It is a photograph, an extended sequence of images which tells the story of a group of teenagers, fifth grade high school students, on a school trip to a town in Puglia where, in fact, there is no reception, cell phones have no notches, they don't take. The boys, as well as the teacher - Vanessa Incontrada - as soon as they realize that they are no longer connected to their virtual world, go into crisis and are forced to descend from three meters above the sky, just to quote the title of the great book success of Moccia, and confronting the broadband of feelings in the first person, direct, live, without the mediation of social networks.
The film is all here and it is a lot and a little at the same time. It's so much why deals with a theme, the use and abuse of mobile communication, of great complexity and not easy to solve for the problems that arise today and will arise even more for future generations. It's not much because he tackles these issues with a kind of resigned contemplation, with a vague hope that with a little effort live human relationships can, should, be better than those achieved through selfies or text messages.
“I was twenty and I will not allow anyone to say that that is the most beautiful age in life” (Paul Nizan) still remains one of the most important quotations in the literature on youthful dilemmas and conflicts because it fully captures the complexities, the difficulties everyone has faced or faces in a moment of existential transition so central in life. From this point of view, "Non c'è campo" sufficiently represents that part of the world that teenagers go through, in the midst of affective, social and cultural upheavals. The story offers a bit of everything and a bit of nothing: there is all the daily life of young people and adults who, in the presence of the field, size their actions and measure the weight of individual and collective behaviours. At the same time, there is nothingness, that vague sense of pneumatic vacuum that assails when one observes a change in progress that is difficult to understand and share. , appear excessively at the same time concentrated in a microcosm of short-term relationships, fluid, light, and light-hearted enough to seem very distant from the real world.
The film flows well, the timing is right, the screenplay holds up. On the merits, the discussion is open: the film can also be watched, with the caveat of turning off the mobile phone first.
