Scrolling through Simone Bozzelli's Instagram profile, one notices several photos from the film "Martha" by R.W. Fassbinder. "Martha" is the celluloid manifesto of couple relationships seen as a power game, where the active party manipulates the more fragile one. "Patagonia" takes the lesson of much Fassbinder cinema and reworks it in a personal way.

Yuri is a 20-year-old from Abruzzo who lives in a small town with aunts who treat him as if he were still an infant. At a children's party he meets Agostino, an entertainer seemingly free of all social constraints. A relationship will begin between the two where Ago promises Yuri an independence that instead turns out to be a sadistic game of submission and manipulation.

The idea of the journey to Patagonia will almost immediately turn into a nightmare where freedom is a utopia, for even Agostino is a slave to his narcissism and the need to subjugate the weaker.

"Patagonia" is a road movie that moves fiercely between clandestine raves, pissing scenes, explosions of erotic tension that never deflagrate into real sexual acts (there is not even a kiss in the film), where everything is pervaded by a psychological ambiguity that is striking.

Unlike Fassbinder, Bozzelli zeroes in on the Marxist component of the German's cinema, where the more affluent subjugate the poor, "Patagonia" is more psychological, each sequence containing more or less explicit metaphors and dialogues about the overpowering between two human beings. Yuri at the children's party is treated by Ago as if he were one of them, the film begins with the protagonist behind the net of a dog cage, a snake at one point devours a mouse, Agostino is always ready to aesthetically belittle Yuri, the film ends inside the skeleton of a van that again looks like a cage, where inside are the protagonists entwined in an embrace that contains all the power of a toxic relationship.

Yuri believes that he can build his identity through Augustine, the latter lets him believe it but in reality the two find themselves imprisoned in the utopia and cynicism that characterize our society, the characters however outsiders are unable to bring about any transformation neither personal nor social, they do not reflect nor work on their identity so as to impose themselves and try to change the collectivity. The little microcosm they have built for themselves is a stoic masochistic act. One must start with oneself to self-determine and not hope to succeed through others.

Augustine and Yuri move through the world as if they were floating creatures, only seemingly viable, in truth they are without fixed points, and discouraged by their inadequacy they fill their inner emptiness with the mirage of freedom.

Shot on film, "Patagonia" is reminiscent of early Matteo Garrone, especially that of "First Love," another grand and frightening story of sentimental subjugation.

The camera is constantly interested in recording the approaches and departures between the characters, it is an overloaded eye that nails itself on the faces of the actors recording their every expression.

A first feature not without its problems, but rabid in its use of two acerbic actors who have almost ungrammatical interpretive rhythms, functional, however, in rendering the tension and awkwardness between them, one incredibly malleable and pure bordering on pathological, the other monstrously devious and in need of asserting himself through wanting to change his partner.

16-Sep-2023 by Ema