“Thanks to my sources of inspiration, the Talking Heads, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Diego Armando Maradona. They all taught me how to make a great show, which is the basis for cinema”. With these words, Paolo Sorrentino not only received his first (let's be optimistic) Oscar award, but he also designed the very personal pantheon, the temple that houses the tutelary deities of his art.
Nothing new, after all. Nothing we didn't already know: "This must be the place" is a two-hour tribute to David Byrne, who also composed the soundtrack, and co. And then there's Scorsese, who is basically the patron deity of Italian cinema in America. Somehow one of us, a Paisà.
There is Fellini, the master: there hasn't been a single critique of the Great Beauty that hasn't involved La dolce vita. For the topics covered, for the portrait of a different Rome, but in the end profoundly similar. For the two protagonists, above all, Mastroianni and Servillo, two class losers who stroll with enormous detachment above the waist, torn between art and gravure, without realizing that they too are swamped like everyone else.
And in the end there is Maradona. It is normal for a Neapolitan born in the 70s to look to him, even when it comes to cinema. And basically Sorrentino could be the Maradona of our directors, the only one capable of doing certain things, of bringing a very bright flash of light even into matches, or, if you prefer, less successful films.
But in the meantime, Italy is once again boasting a statuette after 15 years, since the time of Life is beautiful. In Hollywood, Los Angeles, while here, ten thousand kilometers away, material time looms, and it is no longer (or perhaps it has never been) the time for art. We will however say that Italy is still liked, even if it does not like itself, and perhaps few will say that Italy is liked above all when it tells the only thing it can still tell, its loss of values and orientation, the "metaphor of its decline".
Sorrentino's victory is a very nice victory. It will only be useful if we admit that it is not the victory of our cinema, but the flash of its only champion.
