Author's judgement:
If someone occasionally wonders about why and how Italian cinema is in critical condition (not everything, please) they can find an answer in this week's film: Magic Nights by Paolo Virzì.
We are in July 1990 in Rome, during the final stages of the soccer world championships. The Italian national team is out of the final, previously beaten by Argentina. The general political climate is about to open the doors of tangentopoli. A country in the ford between uncertainty and economic crisis. Cinema, like everything else, follows and accompanies and sometimes anticipates the times and those that are described, those that can be glimpsed in the background, do not appear happy at all. Three young candidates, winners of a screenplay competition, arrive in the city (Mauro Lamantia, Giovanni Toscano and Irene Vetere are newcomers to the national big screen: acting is sufficient in the right place, but it is not only their responsibility) and they find themselves embroiled and accused of the death of a well-known film producer, a Giancarlo Giannini bordering on sufficient.
Little is said about this story, the investigation into the murder, at the beginning and at the end of the film. In between there is a long, verbose and in many respects boring rhetorical speculation about the national cinema. There are parodies of well-known directors, screenwriters, authors and various figures that make up the diverse world of entertainment. We glimpse figures, ghosts, of well-known and lesser-known characters (Federico Fellini), we observe sequences of the good life that seems to accompany cinema environments, including the mythical Roman trattorias where meetings, contracts and friendships take place. All of this takes place in a used and abused Rome (the images of priests walking orderly through the streets of the historic center of the capital have been seen a thousand times). Virzì concentrates entirely on the history of cinema, on lights and shadows (the latter stronger) and almost seems to want to seek justification on the state of national cinematographic art, on its difficulties, on its problems. We must say that he seems to have grasped the goal and, paradoxically, this same film, in its grayness, supports this feeling of crisis, fully describes the drift of Italian productions.
We have also written about it several times in this cinema column by FIRST online: the glory of the past is not enough to withstand the impact of the new tastes of the public. The "Italian comedy" of the 60s is over and the new genre that would like to replace it hasn't formed yet and we don't see anything on the horizon that could bode well. Perhaps, it is no coincidence that Magic Nights dwells at length on the theme of the screenplay, its writing. In fact, there are not a few who argue that a critical foundation of national cinema lies precisely in the difficulty of bringing out texts and subjects appreciable by the general public. Right on the script the film of Paolo Virzì highlights its most significant cracks: slow, twisted, devoid of any narrative cue capable of arousing interest in the story. For the record, we must add that almost nothing works: from photography to the choice of environments. He barely recovers in the finale, when he returns to the ropes of the yellow genre. Little thing. Nothing to do with the great social and cultural fresco that made the director worthy of the great Italian authors such as, for example, Holiday of August of 1996 or the subsequent Ovosodo. Previous American experience with Ella & John-The Leisure seeker it does not seem to have brought him the gift of freshness and originality which, in other circumstances, he has shown to possess. Conclusion: Magical nights to be seen only for professional duty.
