“I really feel like there’s a kind of mouth over the town, able to eat us up,” says Enea, refined younger nightclubber, tennis champion and coke vendor; if anybody is attempting to swallow the Eternal City complete, it’s Enea himself. The son of intellectuals – his mom hosts a tv chat present about literature; his father is a psychoanalyst – the inexhaustible Enea scoots and toots between the town’s most unique sports activities membership, the town’s most unique events and, much more thrillingly, rendezvous with the felony lessons, homespun proletarians to a person. “You have to marry Eva, have a toddler along with her, make her pleased. If you haven’t any one to kiss, you go loopy,” advises Giordano (Adamo Dionisi), pusher and household man, when he learns that playboy Enea has acquired a girlfriend. Whatever. In his line of labor and with the corporate he retains, Giordano isn’t going to final that lengthy.
In his second outing as author and director, now exhibiting in competitors on the Venice Film Festival, Italian actor Pietro Castellitto throws every little thing within the director’s toybox on the display. He additionally performs the central character, portraying him as a charismatic rogue; Giorgio Quarzo Guarascio performs his childhood good friend, accomplice in crime and soulmate Valentino, who has lately and really usefully acquired his pilot’s license. Valentino sees Enea’s father as a affected person. Rome seems to be like a focus camp from above, he tells him throughout their weekly session. “Does flying make you be at liberty?” asks Celeste (Sergio Castellitto, Pietro’s father), a benevolent presence among the many insanity. “No!” replies Valentino emphatically. “If you fall, you all die!” For him, that danger is the actual attraction.
Like his characters, Castellitto the writer-director revels in extra, albeit an extra that’s elaborately aestheticized. Cinematographer Radek Ladczuk, beforehand recognized for the Gothic horror of The Babadook, has a area day; as Enea himself would possibly say, every little thing is permitted. Some scenes are shot trying down at folks’s heads from the ceiling; some are proven within the reflections on tables, water or mirrors; a purple wash of sunshine throughout a nightclub scene cuts to a pale morning fog, as if the movie have been a showroom of potential atmospheres; there are crashes and explosions and a falling tree that narrowly misses killing Enea’s mom, who’s doing yoga in her conservatory when the glass roof is smashed. Soon we see the identical rogue tree whisked sky-high by a crane, the clouds scudding overhead in one other dizzying shot of the world seen the other way up.
Even the candlelight appears frenzied as Enea debates over dinner along with his mom and Valentino as as to if it’s higher to reside alone and free or to be a part of a clan. As a decadent bourgeois, he’s not so eager on household as Giordano. A clan has a shared objective; it’s a band of brothers. In his personal thoughts, Enea is a warrior hero. “Power makes folks fats and silly,” he tells Oresti (Giorgio Montanini), a celebrated biographer who can be one of many drug scene’s energy gamers. “Strength requires integrity.” Enea is protecting a whole lot of dodgy balls within the air, however he nonetheless has time for quasi-Nietzschean philosophizing. Valentino prefers to sing; he even serenades the sufferers on the psychiatric hospital the place his mom is being handled for despair, sporting a Christmas outfit of velvet prepare and furred crown, with a track of his personal devising in regards to the joys of cocaine. His mom watches unmoved as her son is chased from the premises.
Overstuffed, over-written and over-constructed as it’s, Enea is rarely boring. Luca Guadagnino has a producer’s credit score; it’s not exhausting to attract a line between this movie and the voluptuous exuberance of Call Me By Your Name, even when the social gathering scenes appear nearer to the world evoked by Paolo Sorrentino’s movies with Tony Servillo. But whereas the characters vie to make their factors – that we should always learn, that we are actually drowning in books, that the worst potential destiny is to die inside years earlier than you’re truly outdated – it doesn’t depart a way of getting itself made a degree about something. A blast of sound, fury and meticulously thought-about framing, Enea isn’t a long-lasting excessive.
Title: Enea
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Pietro Castellitto
Cast: Pietro Castellitto, Giorgio Quarzo Guarascio, Benedetta Porcaroli, Chiara Noschese, Giorgio Montanini, Adamo Dionisi, Matteo Branciamore, Cesare Castellitto, Sergio Castellitto
Running time: 1 hr 57 min
Sales agent: Vision Distribution
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