Rome before, during and after the drought, the pandemic, the cockroaches, the social crisis. Dystopian Rome that is no longer beautiful but full of confusion, hatred and social and cultural rancor perhaps never dormant. This appears the texture of Drought, the latest work by Paolo Virzì presented last Venice Festival out of competition.
The director had got used to it well: it's hard to forget that little masterpiece of Italian comedy like August holidays of 1996, as well Eggs of the following year, to then arrive at Human capital of 2014. Virzì was certainly a great protagonist of an Italian cinema that is now struggling to regain its identity and originality capable of attracting and bringing the public back to theaters.
Drought, Paolo Virzì's latest film: the plot
The film takes place in a city in the throes of a water crisis that engulfs and dehydrates it not only in the lack of water but also in the feelings and relationships between individuals. Rome appears monochromatic where everything and everyone appears parched, dry like the Tiber itself which brings out antiquity artifacts from its bed. Maybe it's just the evocative and dreamlike images: if this was meant to be a possible metaphorical representation of the moment we're going through, maybe Virzì succeeded. The director proposes a messy and confused mosaic of humanity, desperate and resigned, patiently ordered in line to wait for the tanker that distributes the precious and irreplaceable vital liquid. The background, the metropolitan scenography, the images of the city fail to restore or confirm its own beauty, as if the dystopia of events that describes it should also condemn it to its aesthetic decline.
Drought: a great cast but little passion. The film doesn't convince
The cast is rich and represents a part of the best of the tour company that the market offers: Silvio Orlando, Valerio Mastandrea, Claudia Pandolfi and Monica Bellucci to mention only the best known together with other good quality supporting actors. All, however, to the minimum terms, to the union sufficient, without soul and without courage, in fact, barren like the rest of the city. None of them manages to give body and substance to a character capable of representing that piece of life, real or fictitious role, sufficient to make us glimpse it as possible and plausible.
The film is not convincing: too simple, summary and too "already seen" with many quotes and suggestions of places and characters already present in many other national cinema. Drought seems to mirror the Great Beauty by Sorrentino. The ubiquitous cockroaches and the saving and restorative rain would like to be the final keystone of a screenplay that struggles to hold up a cinematic story adequate to arouse that consensus in theaters that now seems desperately lost.
Italians and cinema: Italian films distant from the interests of the public
Just as Virzì was presenting his film in Venice, the research on “The Italians and the Cinema – The use of films inside and outside Italian cinemas” created by SWG SpA on behalf of the General Directorate of Cinema and Audiovisual of the MiC. We read merciless numbers on the crisis of Italian cinema and cinemas. The reasons are many and varied in nature but, among these, it is legitimate to assume that there is also a progressive one withering of ideas and narrative proposals, just like the dried Tiber represented by Virzì where the best is found in the past and usually submerged by the water that flows through it in its "normal" conditions. In a previous article, we mentioned the case of when, last year, three films by well-known directors were presented almost simultaneously (Verdone, Sorrentino and Moretti) all centered on autobiographical stories. Too little and perhaps too distant from the interests of the public.
