"The Family Friend"
The setting is the Pontine Marshes in Italy, near Rome, rendered habitable by Mussolini's drainage scheme before the war, and now turned into a pleasant, provincial town. A local wiseguy slaps his neck at one stage and grinningly shows the squashed mosquito: "All this was swamps before Il Duce!" Centre stage is Giacomo Rizzo, playing Geremia Di Geremei, an ageing tailor and moneylender, a man who wears his overcoats and jackets over his shoulders in the manner of Italian men of a certain age, and here specifically because he has a broken arm in a cast, though how he sustained the injury is not clear. He scuttles along like a wounded animal, back and forth between his tailoring sweatshop - whose purpose may be to launder usurious income for the taxman's benefit, but where he certainly puts in a full day - and his dire little flat, which he shares with his bedridden mother, and whose only luxury is a big flat-screen TV.
In the shop he accepts petitions from desperate souls who need a cash advance, and a big part of his business is engaged couples and their parents who don't know how they are going to pay for the wedding. Geremia gloats lasciviously over the lovely young brides-to-be and lingeringly kisses them with mock-fatherly affection. The young women, their faces set like concrete, try not to throw up. Back in the flat, Geremia wears an odd potato poultice round his forehead as a migraine cure, which makes him look like the world's least frightening samurai, and wearily submits to whingeing calls from his mother to change her brimming bedpan. "Micro o macro?" (Number ones or number twos?) he asks defeatedly.
Geremia and his clientele have a little face-saving fiction: that he is a "friend of the family", discreetly helping out. The friendship turns ugly when he has to show up at the homes of late-payers with a couple of goons in tow. Sorrentino has a brilliantly black-comic scene in which, creepily solicitous as ever, Geremia tells a terrified couple that he's worried they are getting behind with their payments. After walking off with an expensive food blender in lieu of cash, Geremia stops in the darkened hallway and turns: his sixth sense for weakness having alerted him to something else he's greedy for. Like an insidious predator in the gloom, he wordlessly caresses the young wife who is petrified with disgust but cannot afford to insult him - and reveals his compulsion is not precisely sexual nor financial, but something different, something closer to perverted sentimentality.
The moneylender's career comes to a fateful crux when he pays for the wedding of a beautiful young woman, Rosalba (Laura Chiatti). Her father has no idea how on earth he is going to cover the cost of the festivities, and so, cringing with shame and self-disgust, he ushers Geremia into his daughter's bedroom on the big day and leaves them alone together - on the pretext that, as a tailor, he is going to fix the broken shoulder-strap on her bridal gown.
Sorrentino's movies are seductively indirect, unwilling to reveal their narrative intent or tonal colour. He is an utterly distinctive director, here setting his own lush, bizarre, anti-romantic mood at the beginning by playing a clip of Antony and the Johnsons' unforgettably strange song I Am a Bird Now on the soundtrack, with its keening lyrics: "My lady's story is one of annihilation/ My lady's story is one of breast amputation ..." Rosalba's dance number when she wins a local beauty contest is completely gripping: not quite realistic, nor obviously stylised: an eccentric, but entirely self-possessed piece of choreography, like the rest of the film.
Geremia himself, though loathsome, is an interesting figure: Sorrentino engineers a suspension of judgment by not revealing everything about him straight away, by keeping us off-balance on the tilting floorplan of his fictional world, and by giving him plenty of funny lines. He has a habit of assuring his customers: "My last thought will be of you!" which has a camp nonchalance to it, as well as a poignant reminder of his imminent death. Food is a big consideration. He is sentimentally entranced to hear about a baby's breast-feeding: "Weaning is the first step to the restaurant!" And he nurses his own eccentric objections to certain vegetables: "Red peppers are like depleted uranium after 30 years."
The relationship between Geremia and the defiant Rosalba, though unlikely in any realistic sense, actually reminded me, more than a little, of the parodic affair between the disfigured De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna in the Jacobean revenge drama The Changeling: an affair kickstarted by disgust and then driven by an intimacy in corruption and shame. I can't believe Sorrentino had the classical English stage in mind when he wrote this, but it has the same beady-eyed satirical sense of conceit, arrogance and delusion. It's a deeply involving film, with a cracking performance from Giacomo Rizzo, which left me baffled but very amused and intrigued. Not everyone wants to feel like this in the cinema. If you do, then this is something you need to check out.
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Directed by Paolo Sorrentino; starring Giacomo Rizzo, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Laura Chiatti
During the 40 years following the Second World War, the Italian film industry led the world with a succession of influential masterpieces from de Sica, Rossellini, Fellini, Visconti, Rosi, Antonioni, Bertolucci and others, that changed the face of cinema. In recent years, however, Nanni Moretti alone has attracted widespread interest and admiration. Now 53-year-old Moretti has been joined by Paolo Sorrentino, some 18 years his junior and temperamentally very different, though Sorrentino has a cameo role in Moretti's latest film, Caiman, which opens here in two weeks.
Whereas Moretti is light, bright, direct, witty, humane and politically committed, Sorrentino is dark, obscure, sombre and detached. His second feature film, The Consequences of Love (his first feature, L'Uomo in Piu, has yet to be shown here) was an elegant variation on Hemingway's The Killers, in which a middle-aged Mafia money-launderer sits chain-smoking in an anonymous hotel beside a Swiss lake, living a life of obsessive routine until some men from the mob come to collect him. It has a commanding central performance from Toni Servillo, and there is a similarly impressive one by Giacomo Rizzo in his new picture. The Family Friend (L'Amico di famiglia) has no more plot than its predecessor and also turns eventually into a kind of thriller.
The movie opens with a puzzling succession of seemingly unrelated scenes - an elderly nun buried up to her neck on a beach; a bearded man in a cowboy outfit tending a horse beside an old lorry; a young Romanian girl arriving by bus in the rain; two teams of scantily clad young girls ogled by the camera as they play volleyball; and an elderly man, his arm in a sling, a handkerchief wrapped around his head, being ordered by someone in an adjoining room to empty her bedpan.
This old man, played by Giacomo Rizzo, is gradually revealed as the movie's central character, the ugly, misshapen Geremia. He's a 70-year-old tailor living in squalor with his bedridden mother in a town in the Agro Pontino region of Latina south of Rome near the Tyrrhenian Sea. His real job, however, is that of moneylender or, more properly, loan shark.
Geremia is the man who's had the nun buried. The cowboy figure is his only friend, Gino, who runs a small cafe, does Geremia's dirty work, attends line-dancing evenings at country music clubs and nurses the dream of moving to Nashville. It is his licentious eye looking at the volleyball players. The Romanian girl has been brought to Italy by a hideous marriage-broker as potential wife and skivvy for Geremia.
This moneylender (so much less sympathetic than the money-launderer of Consequences of Love) likes to be called 'Geremia the Golden Hearted'. He's a Dickensian monster, part Uriah Heep, part Fagin, and a reincarnation of the Grimms' malevolent, lecherous dwarf, Rumpelstiltskin.
Cruel, callous, hypocritical, he exploits everyone around him while pretending to be their friend and constantly cites Reader's Digest as the source of his worldly wisdom. As with David Lynch, we're often left wondering whether what we're seeing is real or imaginary, possibly a dream. A naked girl in a park, for instance, may be something in Geremia's mind. When he goes to Rome to contact his long-absent father, he sees three centurions walking down the street at night beside the Coliseum. Is this a vision? No, it's a bizarre, and crucial link in the plot.
If the chief influence on The Consequences of Love would appear to be Antonioni, Sorrentino is on record as naming Fellini as the dominant figure behind The Family Friend. One assumes that this is not merely because of the grotesques on show but because of the bleak seaside setting and the references to the legacy of fascism. One of the characters remarks that the town is built on marshland reclaimed by Mussolini, whose engineers failed to eradicate the mosquitoes that still plague the place.
The town is dominated by fascist architecture, soulless, brutalist, grandiose, reeking of fake classicism and false order. More often than not, the streets are deserted and when people do appear, they stand around in a stylised fashion as if overawed by the buildings around them. There are strong hints of Bertolucci's The Conformist here.
As I've said, the movie turns into a kind of thriller, reminiscent of The Sting or perhaps of Fellini's film about confidence tricksters, Il Bidone. We're hoping that Geremia will get his comeuppance and we can see it coming when he's tempted to enter the big time, lured into making the kind of loan that only banks can handle. Sorrentino takes many risks. The elliptical manner, the stylisation, the obscurity, the self-consciousness will infuriate many people. But the greatest risk is having an antihero so physically and morally despicable that however bravura the performance (and Rizzo is magnificently uningratiating), we won't have any pity for him.
Nowadays, we are so moved by that other moneylender, Shylock, his treatment, character and fate, that the scene that follows his humiliation is scarcely tolerable. There's nothing like that here. What we are invited to contemplate is the terrible situation of a man incapable of loving or being loved. The film is subtly lit by Luca Bigazzi, who was also director of photography on The Consequences of Love.
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