Schermo Italia: the farce and the beauty

The second series of The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series, begins with the arrival in England of a young Italian criminal working for a mafia boss who has been approached by local gangsters planning to invest in our country. Unlike the latter, who conceal their criminality behind good manners, the Italian is inept and a braggart, and never misses an opportunity to display all the stereotypes that plague us: he gesticulates wildly, is inherently dishonest, shamelessly flirts with women and boasts about his heritage with pathetic references to past glories. In the scenes shot in Italy, our country appears in all its splendour, accompanied by the inevitable backdrop of opera: a beauty that seems wasted, in a land ‘with monsters round every corner’ where the institutions are in cahoots with the underworld. The only other notable Italian character is a countess, the embodiment of a narrow-minded and insular social class, and of an elegance that belongs to the past: she is embarrassed by the criminal’s vulgarity and has learnt to observe propriety thanks to the traditions of her family.

In short, beauty is confined to the past, as in the case of a Botticelli painting, and the only excellence celebrated is that of Beretta rifles. One cannot expect too much subtlety from a programme such as The Gentlemen, but this depressing portrayal is not very different from that of the White Lotus season set in a hotel in Taormina, with the manager hiding her neuroses behind authoritarian perfectionism, two shrewd escorts and the inevitable mafioso. As is well known, the government’s line is to change the narrative surrounding our country, and these portrayals call for reflection, starting with the stereotypes that everywhere reinforce prejudices and shy away from deeper analysis: one need only venture into a discussion of American society to realise that even in Italy there is a tendency to oversimplify its characteristics through the most hackneyed clichés. When considering how this trend might be reversed, it is important not to forget the industrial heart of the film industry: both the major studios and the all-powerful streaming platforms know that the most obvious choice is also the most profitable one: it is risky to change a narrative that works, given a reality that is far more varied and, in many respects, decidedly different.

Today, Italian production companies have limited clout compared to the major studios, but this has not always been the case: until a few years ago, high-quality series such as The Young Pope, Gomorra and My Brilliant Friend made their mark on the world stage, directed by top-class filmmakers and starring – in the case of The Young Pope – international stars: In some cases, they portrayed an even more violent and corrupt image of the country, yet one free from prejudice and stereotypes. This was happening whilst Luca Guadagnino was making – and continues to make – international films and series in Italy too, as in the case of We Are Who We Are. One wonders why there are no productions like those mentioned today and what has happened in the space of just a few years: it is clear that every factor that makes productions competitive on an international level plays a decisive role, but the primary responsibility for the narrative lies with the writers, who are all too often tied to depicting local situations and realities that lack universality.

It is worth analysing which of our films have been successful abroad and how Italians have been portrayed in international productions, starting with the criminal in The Gentlemen who boasts descent from Michelangelo. In Good Morning Babilonia by the Taviani brothers, two craftsmen hired in Hollywood on the set of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance proudly claimed to be ‘the sons of the sons of the sons of Michelangelo and Leonardo’, before adding, in a contemptuous tone, ‘and whose son are you?’. The film was made in 1987, and one wonders whether, forty years on, we still find ourselves caught between our own pride and the derision of others. Great cinema has repeatedly managed to succeed without succumbing to stereotypes: one need only think of La Dolce Vita, which remains one of the highest-grossing international films of all time. Beyond a long series of extraordinary iconic sequences – the statue of Christ flying over the rooftops of Rome, the Trevi Fountain, the aristocrats’ party – the film owes part of its success to a superficial interpretation of what Fellini is telling us: the glamorous veneer has overshadowed the tale of a writer’s downfall, a man who renounces his own talent and can no longer heed the call of purity, as the film’s finale – in yet another unforgettable scene – reveals. Once we look beyond the glittering surface, we find ourselves faced with a sombre work, marked by moral corruption and despair, as evidenced by the suicide of Steiner, the intellectual who deludes himself into believing he can live amidst the perfect beauty of Renaissance paintings. Gay Talese, who, swept up by the film’s charm, decided to get married in Rome, maintains that La dolce vita depicts “a hell disguised as paradise”.

It is not dissimilar to what happened with Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza, an Oscar-winning film closely linked to Fellini’s cinema. Jep Gambardella, too, has turned his back on his talent after writing a cult book, and drags himself wearily to parties which he enjoys only at the thought of causing them to fail. Malice is an attempt to overcome boredom, and beauty can only be glimpsed in the silence of dawn within certain stately homes, or is lamented in the memory of a youth now gone. These are, however, all too fleeting moments: the sentiment conveyed by the film is one of defeat and depression. Despite the presence of a mystical saint who feeds only on roots, here too part of the film’s success is due to a hedonistic surface, which celebrates an extremely elegant homo italicus with such immense talent that he can afford to squander it. Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella was certainly an extraordinary success; it dares to adopt comedic tones in recounting the greatest abomination of the twentieth century and celebrates the love of a father who shields his son from the tragic reality with increasingly far-fetched tales: this is yet another homo italicus, whose jester-like theatrics and ability to get by are extolled.

In the era of neorealism, the saying that ‘dirty laundry is washed within the family’ was certainly a serious mistake, but there is no denying that those masterpieces immortalise a tragic reality, which becomes grotesque in comedies: what impression might a viewer from another country form when faced with the diabolical plan to get rid of his wife, carried out by the protagonist of Divorzio all’italiana? Or of the murderous police inspector in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, which triumphed unexpectedly at the Oscars? Very often it is our own filmmakers who create a dissolute, tragic and irredeemable narrative, and we cannot expect foreign cinema to portray anything different. There are also films with a humanist approach, which embraces our limitations, such as Amarcord, which won an Oscar and is loved by audiences all over the world. We are talking, however, of an artist who chose a bittersweet tone as he approached the twilight of his life’s journey, having won his first two Oscars with tragic stories such as La strada and Le notti di Cabiria, and his third with 8½, which concluded with the line ‘life is a party’: a moving yet utterly universal humanism, not tied to our cultural reality.

After a long period of stagnation, films have emerged that are neither negative nor depressing in tone, but which feature the elements that international audiences love in an Italian production: the soldiers in Mediterraneo are light-hearted and intelligent, whilst the protagonists of Il Postino, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso and Call Me by Your Name are romantic and full of passion. With the exception of the latter, they are all set in the past and always feature captivating settings: in my view, the ability to resonate with the tastes of audiences worldwide whilst highlighting distinctly Italian characteristics is a talent in itself, and I wish to emphasise the importance of the producers: Franco Cristaldi, in particular, engaged openly with Giuseppe Tornatore to ensure the film’s success.

I have not mentioned the adaptation of an Italian literary classic such as Vittorio De Sica’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, nor a film that has very little Italian about it, such as L’ultimo imperatore, apart from Bernardo Bertolucci and his key collaborators. While our filmmakers immortalised Italy through their own eyes, international cinema—and Hollywood in particular—portrayed a picture that can be summarised in a few categories, starting with geographical implausibility: in Nine, a dreadful musical adaptation of 8½, Daniel Day-Lewis travels from the outskirts to the centre of Rome via the Amalfi Coast. Something similar occurs in the no less dreadful House of Gucci, where Adam Driver cycles around Milan via Rome’s Coppedè district. In Summertime, a great director like David Lean falls into the trap of portraying a Venetian child who looks every bit the part of a Neapolitan street urchin, which is a shame, because the film – which also features the cliché of the treacherous Italian Latin lover – depicts the loneliness of a middle-aged, unmarried American woman with remarkable psychological subtlety. Of course, there are also accurate films, and the list is long of those that celebrate architectural wonders, such as The Belly of the Architect or even the quarries that supplied Michelangelo with marble, as in The Brutalist. In the category of the ambiguous homage, the essential example is The Third Man, where the villainous protagonist explains to a friend that the violent years of the Borgias were also those of Leonardo and Michelangelo, whilst in five hundred years of peace and brotherly love, Switzerland has produced nothing but cuckoo clocks.

In Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino stages a sequence in which he pokes fun at stereotypes of Italians: the film is a remake of Enzo G. Castellari’s That Damned Armoured Train, just as Django Unchained was a remake of Sergio Corbucci’s film. He is responsible for the revival of Italian B-movies, as evidenced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Once Upon a Time… Hollywood.

International film directors are generally baffled by our politics: in The Godfather Part III, a degenerate offshoot of the first two instalments, a man commits a murder whilst quoting Giulio Andreotti’s line: ‘Power wears down those who do not have it’. Coppola must have been struck by it, but in the film the line has no real dramatic significance. In Titus, two factions clash under the banners of Roma and Lazio, and one gets the impression that Julie Taymor wishes to immortalise a world in which farce has replaced tragedy. As for the category of traditions, the finest example is the Sicilian sequence in The Godfather, with the story of Michael Corleone’s falling in love, courtship and marriage, whilst Italy as a land of joy and love has yielded varying results, depending on the calibre of the filmmakers: Roman Holiday is a classic because William Wyler succeeds in portraying a sunny and chaotically perfect atmosphere, something Jean Negulesco fails to achieve in Three Coins in the Fountain or Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in The Tourist. As Tarantino demonstrates, it is possible to make skilful use of stereotypes, which, in Billy Wilder’s work, takes on an affectionate tone: in What Happened Between My Father and Your Mother?, there is no character more endearing than the shrewd hotel manager Carlucci. It was 1972, and the character is the polar opposite of the manager in The White Lotus. It’s the same approach taken by Woody Allen in Everyone Says I Love You: unlike in recent productions, the beauty of Italy also influences the characters’ sensibilities and intelligence, just as it did in Vincent Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town.

Beauty that is, however, used in a contrasting light in horror films: cities of art become the setting for monstrous crimes, as in A Venezia un dicembre rosso shocking or Hannibal. Even the glamour of The Talented Mr Ripley plays on the dissonance with the crimes committed by the protagonist, and the splendour of Capri and Casa Malaparte makes the protagonists’ crisis in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt all the more painful.

This stands in contrast to what occurs in Somewhere, by Sofia Coppola, who deeply loves our country, from which her grandfather Carmine emigrated. Her gaze is disheartened when she shows the protagonist at the Telegatti awards ceremony: no stereotypes, no lazy or malicious exaggerations, but an authentic portrayal of an event that has long enjoyed success. The director is well aware that Italy is not just that, but even this helps us to understand why a new narrative is so difficult to achieve.