What sort of films do you make, mate? The Venice Film Festival as seen from outside Italy

“Oh well, but have you seen Variety? Have you read The Hollywood Reporter? And The Guardian?” That is always how my Venetian sources—friends, accomplices, and informants on permanent duty at the Lido—reply when I ask on WhatsApp whether such-and-such an Italian film is really as ‘powerful’, ‘essential’, ‘unmissable’, or a ‘contender for the Golden Lion’ as I read in our newspapers, at least those two or three leading ones vying for the few remaining readers. And since, after all, in Venice everyone knows everyone else and we all stay in the same hotels, the scathing review in Variety also becomes a bit of local revenge – to be mentioned in a low voice, with relish, between one spritz and another in front of the Palazzo del Cinema: ‘Have you seen? It’s not me saying it, it’s Variety.’ It should be noted that criticism is not an exact science; it thrives on conflicting opinions, as we know. Yet this gulf between the over-the-top defence of Italian cinema and the Anglo-Saxon yawn seems, at least to me, increasingly symptomatic of a system. This becomes even clearer in those positive reviews in which one can still detect a hint of embarrassment—the kind that, when read in reverse, like The Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9”, seem to whisper subliminally, “Bloody hell, what a bore, but I can’t say so”. These are my favourites: full of phrases like ‘prismatic film’, ‘uncompromising film’, ‘difficult film’ (which has even become an official category). In short, more and more often, the film that in Rome is ‘the great family drama we’ve been missing’ becomes, in Los Angeles, ‘a headache-inducing affair’; the actress who, over here, ‘bravely puts herself on the line’ is, over there, ‘reduced to a one-dimensional caricature with no motivation’. It happens with a certain regularity, especially when Venice is involved (and then the reverse, of course – Americans praising things we hide or downplay; we’ll get to that later). Nanni Moretti, in competition this year, represents a textbook case of this geo-cinematic asymmetry; Moretti, as we know, is a religion, the Scientology of Italian cinema, with each film functioning as a Second Morettian Council that determines who will be excommunicated, demoted, or reinstated after the schism—an equation that often leaves American critics perplexed, just as we are with baseball.

Let us instead turn to the film by Edoardo De Angelis, who, like Moretti, is in competition at Venice: "Il fuoco che ti porti dentro", based on the highly acclaimed novel by Antonio Franchini, which everyone kept telling me to read at one point—a Neapolitan mother, a son who writes in Milan, family grudges, and a ruthless opening line about the aforementioned mother who stinks (I did read that bit). Vanessa Scalera, who has left her role as Imma Tataranni behind, appears gaunt and haggard as she makes the leap from Rai Fiction to Rai Cinema—the same building, two floors up. Our team believes that ‘Vanessa Scalera has already won’ and deserves ‘at least a Volpi Cup’. De Angelis’s camera “investigates and interrogates rather than merely observing”, and the film “does not view Naples and Milan as a mere geographical contrast, but as two emotional temperatures: fire and distance”. Emotional temperatures. High-flown prose. A film that questions – which is always a bit daunting: will we be prepared, will we have studied enough?

Then I take a look at the aforementioned Variety & Co. “God forbid”, “too much shouting”, “I’ve seen more emotionally balanced reality shows”, “a bubbling stew of national stereotypes” (culinary clichés are all the rage this year; Moretti was described as “stale tiramisu”). No emotional intensity. No cross-examinations. But “an unbearable family drama set on Christmas Eve”, says Variety itself, which in the piece even indulges in several “a mum’s a mum” moments, written just like that, in Italian, effectively taking the mickey out of us. At that point, one thinks: the Americans don’t understand a thing; they should just stick to their blockbusters. Or: thank goodness that at least they see our films for what they are, without the usual cliques, cronyism, backroom deals, pacts with the Davids – all that sort of thing. Yet these are perhaps two mirror-image forms of provincialism. They are two different ways of explaining nothing.

In the old ‘golden age’, the gap between Italian and American criticism was narrower or – even more interestingly – reversed: it was the Italians who relished tearing the ‘Masters’ to shreds, as Fofi did with Fellini or, to some extent, with just about everyone. The gap widened later, when that particular kind of cinema came to an end. Partly because the earlier filmmakers were all seen as national icons, all part of a single Italian cinema serving as a collective autobiography, whilst the later ones – Benigni, Sorrentino, Guadagnino, Rohrwacher – are isolated peaks, brands in their own right. And partly because our institutional critics, given the general trend, have started to defend as much as possible the films we take to festivals and the system that revolves around them – a system of which they themselves are a part – even displaying flashes of pride in our ‘gross domestic product’ that were less common before.

Focusing on the Italians in Venice, the ones being discussed – because there are a whole host of others who remain in the background. As well as De Angelis and Moretti, there are: Marco Bechis on the Argentine dictatorship; Gianni Amelio on hospitality and remorse, featuring Alessandro Borghi as a bookseller in Piazza Risorgimento, Rome; Anna Foglietta with a family in silent crisis; Andrea Pallaoro, who directed Echo Chamber – in English – starring Vikander, Marinelli and Susan Sarandon, based on a final screenplay left in Bertolucci’s drawer (and causing a huge ministerial row over the lack of funding, as you may recall). Then there’s Mario Martone’s adaptation of Starnone’s novel, starring Toni Servillo; followed by Roberto De Paolis’s Serpenti, about a man who murders women but manages to avoid arrest; then L’estranea by Paolo Strippoli, the group’s only genre film, complete with a pact with the devil; and Guadagnino’s documentary on Bertolucci, seven and a half hours long and setting a new benchmark for appointments – no longer ‘see you in September’, but ‘see you after the Bertolucci documentary’. One can also imagine the confusion of the non-Italian critic grappling with our films in Venice. There he is, popping in and out of the cinemas, only ever to come across Alessandro Borghi (three films at the Lido) or Jasmine Trinca (two of the five in competition). Not that it is their fault, mind you: Borghi and Trinca are still great; it is the system that has become narrow-minded, and in the end, we always end up drawing from the same pool. And indeed, as different as they are on paper, these films have at least two things in common: the houses and Rai Cinema. So many stories with characters confined within a flat, perhaps a grand metaphor for our ‘domestic realism’ – a national genre that encompasses almost everything. De Angelis locks a mother and son away in a Milanese living room. Martone confines Toni Servillo within four walls and a balcony. Pallaoro keeps Vikander and Sarandon inside three Roman rooms masquerading as London. Amelio does the exact opposite yet the same thing: bookseller Borghi’s house throws open its doors, filling up with migrants, relatives and strangers with trolleys. Foglietta plants the camera in the house that suddenly empties – the daughter leaving for university, an unspeakable drama. ‘Dining-room cinema’, as it was once derisively called: the row in the kitchen, the family as a battlefield, the drama played out with two sofas and three chairs – but without Kate Winslet or Jodie Foster or Christoph Waltz as in Polanski’s Carnage, that is, without that star system that makes you watch even films where almost nothing happens (who would have watched Seven Years in Tibet without Brad Pitt?). De Angelis’s film is set in Milan – his son has fled up there, works as an editor, and has polished off his accent – but “you can only hear Naples”, they even complain in Variety. They’re right. “A story set in a flat in the centre of Milan but reconstructed in Naples”, the synopsis states: a triumph of zero-kilometre domestic realism.

The second thing they have in common is the decisive one: Rai Cinema. Always. Like a family surname: Moretti, De Angelis, Pallaoro, Strippoli, Bechis, Foglietta. Here is something the Variety critic might not know: Rai Cinema means the film is, more or less, already paid for before you even buy your ticket. Going to the cinema is optional: if you go, all the better; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, because the money comes from upstream – from advance sales to the television broadcaster that is a partner in the production. The State, in the form of the Ministry, produces; the State, in the form of Rai, buys. Consequently, there is a strange tension even amongst Italian critics, who are certainly well aware of the mechanism: they already know they are watching films that aren’t made for the general public. And if it flops at the box office, we can always blame capitalism – after all, we’re all against it here, as Jasmine Trinca rightly pointed out in Venice. One of the few films not produced by Rai Cinema is Serpenti, by Roberto De Paolis, in the Venice Spotlight section, which I didn’t even know existed: one of the few Italian films at the Festival not funded through the licence fee. It is an unusual film right from the brochure: a man kills his wife and fails to get himself arrested; he wanders round police stations where nobody takes him seriously; a lawyer tries to dissuade him from turning himself in; a policeman more preoccupied with his migraine. That fierce and grotesque cinema – in the style of Petri or Monicelli – that we no longer make (or so I’m told on WhatsApp; I trust them). And indeed, the Americans liked it – or at least the one New York critic who even realised it existed: ‘ruthless satire, hilarious cast’. Here, however, few are taking any notice of it. Outside the Rai fold, apart from Serpenti, there’s La città dei vivi, based on Lagioia’s novel, which reconstructs the murder of Luca Varani without showing anything – a film relegated to the ‘Orizzonti’ section: here, the main consensus was that it ‘deserved a place in the Competition’, and indeed it ended up in Toronto, away from Rai Cinema. The Americans also take Paolo Strippoli’s horror film seriously – perhaps too seriously – the 33-year-old, the pride of Puglia, with awards and accolades from around the world. In Venice, however, I hear Italian critics qualifying their praise: “It’s good, but it’s a horror film”, as if to warn the perhaps seventy-year-old viewer, as if to say, half a century after The Shining, it’s not exactly serious stuff – what’s it doing here? (Strippoli has Valeria Bruni Tedeschi playing the devil; for that alone, he has my utmost respect). Horror, even if we still struggle to accept it here, is one of the few ‘passports’ we can afford. It is a format that can be understood in any language, without the need for translation, and it sells – it is not merely scheduled in the late-night slot on Rai3. Pallaoro’s film follows the same logic: shot in English, with two stars and the spectre of Bertolucci hanging over it like a mortgage. Another format – auteur cinema for export. I would not choose to watch it even under duress, but it is designed to make a big impact abroad, after Chiasso. And in fact, if Variety slams De Angelis – and pays little heed to the other titles – it’s because Rai Cinema International is marketing it as an ‘export title’ (film festivals aren’t just showcases for films, actors and Palestine, but markets where things are bought and sold). The American critic deems it unsellable; we just shrug our shoulders: after all, back home, the film’s box office is already in the bag. Bertolucci’s posthumous work might perhaps sell a few copies. And the Americans are more lenient here. Even when it comes to houses: De Angelis builds a ‘Milanese-style’ house in Naples and Variety mocks him for it. Pallaoro does exactly the same thing – a Roman flat disguised as a London one – and it immediately becomes a ‘liminal space’, an auteur’s choice. Films sell this way too, and above all this way.

In short, it is not that Americans possess superior insight or are more skilled critics. Rather, they view these films from a market perspective—that aspect of capitalism to which Jasmine Trinca objects. From that angle, they happen to observe details that we would be well advised not to overlook.

Then there is the public, the great thorn in the side of this story, who statistically seem to behave much more like the American critic, even if they do not read Variety. In short, everything – or almost everything – rests on the Rai Cinema system, the full implications of which the American critic may not fully grasp. Rai Cinema and Venice are the only public institutions shielded from political patronage: no ‘spoils system’ or ‘cineMeloni’ for Del Brocco, nor for Barbera, who remained in his post even under Buttafuoco. To a large extent, perhaps, this is a good thing, mind you. In the film industry, it is almost always the case: festivals thrive on relationships built up over twenty years; changing directors at every turn would shatter them. There are monocratic institutions: I have no recollection of Cannes without Thierry Frémaux; Berlin had Dieter Kosslick for eighteen years. Barbera has been directing Venice since 2012, Del Brocco has been at the helm of Rai Cinema since 2010 – sixteen years, under governments of every political persuasion. Untouchable empires. And that’s fine. The problem, however, begins afterwards. Because behind Cannes lies a real market – France has the highest cinema attendance in Europe – and a funding body with many channels, the CNC. There, a director who stays for twenty years does not create a bottleneck: there are many channels. Here, there is almost only one gateway. Stability is compounded by a compulsory buyer – Rai Cinema, which has taken on nearly a thousand films in sixteen years, all of which have passed across its desk – and a box office that counts for nothing. The film has already been paid for, a cinema screening is optional, the critics applaud, and never mind if anyone out there doesn’t get it. It is not a conspiracy. It is not a caste system. It is not a ‘clique’, but an ecosystem that suits pretty much everyone and which also produces – even more than too many films – actresses who rail against capitalism and productivity (if only we had some productivity).