Carlo Verdone who plays himself in the times of social media and OTT platforms, of cinema that is "no longer what it used to be" with the characters that made him famous, of the transition from "... let's do it strange" to "... let's do it old". This is the plot of Vita da Carlo, a series in ten episodes since yesterday in distribution on Amazon Prime Video.
Let's talk first about the content and then about the container. Verdone is, contains and concentrates a large part of the national film comedy of the last decades. His "characters" have told better than many other tics, vices and virtues of the average Italian. In this case, there is the actor, the director, the screenwriter, the protagonist himself, the "character" Verdone who tells Verdone, in all his generosity, his hypochondria, his own culture and his abilities professional achievements in his more mature age.
The series proposed by Amazon in ten "pills" tells of Carlo grappling with two great dilemmas: making a cultured film, eligible for major international competitions, intimate, on the cover of Cahiers du cinéma (very prestigious cinema magazine) or accepting the proposal to become mayor of Rome. In the middle are the city dwellers who stop and interrupt him continuously to take a selfie, in the company of his best friend (Max Tortora in great dust that in the film he complains of not being recognized and remembered by anyone), with his daughter's boyfriend who "loves him" and he becomes attached. In short, it is always that world of varied humanity that composed all of his previous works.
By now Verdone is a brand, a trademark that leaves no room for mediation: you may like it or not but the ingredients of his films skilfully mixed together are always the same, or rather a cinematographic product that in one way or another resembles much to what we have seen and appreciated.
The narrative key of Life with Charles used this time is certainly amusing when the "characters" of the past re-emerge in the background evoked in the screenplay of the film that the self-styled producer friend would like to make and which instead he is reproached for not having re-proposed: it is a game of mirrors between present and past, between reality and fiction that holds up well to the pace of television.
This last notation takes us straight to the heart of other assessments regarding the "container", i.e. Amazon Prime, with which he had already experimented in his previous work. You Only Live Once was released last May. This new product is a typical example of serial "television", a platform with global stages, to be enjoyed in short and condensed, self-supporting pills or with a feast of binge watching that forces us into a marathon of 10 episodes of about 30 minutes each.
We strongly feel that we are in the presence of a new audiovisual grammar, a new language, a different way of filming and editing the scenes where the world of traditional cinema separates and increasingly distinguishes itself with the analog story from the digital one with the alternating and fragmented in space and time.
The stamp and the image of the "character" Verdone remains the same but the frame and therefore the recipients of the vision, the public, changes and not a little. It is one thing to write the images of a product intended for a single perception, like a cinema, another thing is to write and set up a product intended for a heterogeneous audience that uses it in the many possible ways, spatial and temporal, which can be used with different devices such as mobile phones, tablets or PCs. Paraphrasing Humphrey Bogart when he said «It's the press, honey! The print! And you can't help it! Nothing!" it can be said that “. It's streaming beauty. And you can't do anything about it!"
In fact, it is difficult (not impossible) to make and distribute a film that aspires to go beyond national borders if it is not able to understand the new dimensions of the market which is made up of capitals, technologies and contents intelligible by many "audiences". different from each other. Perhaps the time of Enzo in Un Sacco Bello, of Pasquale Amitrano in Bianco Rosso e Verdone or of Sergio in Talcum Powder just to name a few among the innumerable portraits of the average Italian is over, and a new era has begun of a Verdone who no longer knows choose his new cinematic mask and fall back on the story of himself which, in any case, is a nice retreat that lets you look at it with satisfaction, comfortably lying on the sofa instead of on the armchairs of the cinema. It will never be the same, it will never be comparable with the charm of the big screen, but Verdone is still a national monument of Italian cinema.
