Review by Beatrice On 26-Feb-2024
Sometimes it is better not to know things To ignore what will happen tomorrow Indeed what will happen in an instant After all, how could we hold out any hope for our future, if we already knew it?
Naples
Evidence of gravity, of resistance, of machismo.
Caracas is part of a group of Nazi fanatics who enjoy beating and persecuting refugees.
His love for Yasmina leads him to encounter the Islamic world, the contrast, the doubt, the torment between violence and the desire for peace.
Giordano Fonte is a distinguished writer who returns to Naples after having been away for some time: a city unrecognizable, gloomy, humid, where nostalgia meets degradation and disgust, violence and abandonment.
A city, pitiless and seductive, excessive and degrading that welcomes him with deference and punishes him by swallowing his identity.
He wants to stop writing Giordano but will not be able to; life does not allow for plans.
Caracas, between the extreme right and Islam is in deep existential conflict, between doubts and uncertainties, between hell and the redemption of his own daimon.
He is a child of our time, the director argues, hating the sea, loving and loathing his city, brash as a like a South American barrio, damned as a Brazilian favela and forgotten as an Indian slum.
Based on Ermanno Rea's literary work Napoli Ferrovia, it chronicles Naples and all that it entails.
"A film as inexplicable as life," confusing, circular, never linear...
Opaque, tragically playful, restless and searching for unreliable answers.
The attempt to anchor itself in obsolete truths, where contemporaneity subtracts, divides, dishevels, drains: nostalgia meets the impossibility of turning one's head the other way.
I never thought there was a need for God to say what is right and what is wrong, perhaps it can help one feel less alone but even then with poor results, the writer adds.
A journey into the past for a future that is not there, because Naples is the world that swallows you up and loses you in the belly of an indecipherable and arcane reality.
A film that encounters bewilderment, ferment and darkness, torment and hope.
A film that distorts itself, dilating and framing the sometimes impossible, yet fatal necessity whose blurred contours photograph a world gone.
An exiled search for an elsewhere that is missing because God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? What most sacred and most mighty the world possessed until now has bled out under our knives; who will cleanse this blood from us? With what water shall we be able to wash? What atoning rites, what sacred games shall we invent? Is not the greatness of this action too great for us? .....
26-Feb-2024 by Beatrice