After L’échappée belle and Folle de joie, two road movies, Virzì takes us on a journey once more, but this time through his memories as an apprentice filmmaker, guiding us through the city of Rome to explore the Italian cinema world of the 1990s.
Three young people, winners of a screenplay contest, Antonio the Sicilian with an ornate manner of speaking (Mauro Lamantia), Luciano the resourceful and flirtatious Tuscan (Giovanni Toscano), and Eugenia the Roman from a troubled affluent family (Irene Vetere) spend the night at the police station because on the night of the World Cup soccer match, amidst the cheering fans, a film producer’s car plunged into the Tiber and he was found drowned.
All three become the prime suspects, having spent the previous days in the company of the producer Saponardo (Giancarlo Giannini), attending meetings, shootings, screenwriter offices, producer offices, producer’s pools, restaurants, parties frequented by directors, producers, and screenwriters. It’s a whirlwind of encounters and discoveries, illusions and disappointments for these young people faced with the grandeur and misery of the waning Italian cinema.
The sequences are varied and dense, the pace is brisk, but in trying to show all facets of this lost world, the film sometimes scatters and loses its rhythm.
Paolo Virzì and his regular, real-life screenwriters (Francesca Archibugi and Francesco Piccolo) continually make us laugh at these caricature-like characters, Saponardo could be a Cecchi Gori and Pontani (Ferruccio Soleri) an Antonioni, with brilliant and humorous dialogues. And despite a sharp view of the cinematic monsters of his time, there is a tenderness for the great masters, such as Fellini, whom he depicts filming his last scene of “La Voce della Luna” with Roberto Benigni.
Paolo Virzì: “This film is an act of love and gratitude, which goes against what was probably the most significant cultural phenomenon of contemporary Italy: our cinema. Its protagonists were powerful—a sort of impregnable old regime—in the years of my education and the summer recounted in the film. But in watching it, now that it’s completed, I realize how retracing this mythology was liberating, even with this mocking, humorous spirit. As if it were a final farewell, a way to settle once and for all a debt as precious as it is burdensome.
Finally, it was an opportunity to play with the very essence of storytelling, writing, and directing by mixing truth and invention, real and fictional memories. All framed by a plot: a long night at the carabinieri station, around the mystery of a corpse and an investigation. The pleasure of using the tools of the trade, of retracing with these three imaginary apprentice screenwriters the real memories mixed with the lies of frenetic days and magical, comedic, threatening nights that still haunt my dreams.”
