Review by Beatrice On 28-Jan-2024
In cases of crisis that force people to choose between various courses of action, the majority will choose the worst possible one.
Gianna, selfish and devoted to God, is obsessed with the porn star Pupa.
A restraining order forces her to stay away from her while she wants to confess only to talk about herself.
Her husband was found dead in the porn star's bed, and Gianna has been stalking her ever since.
Caterina is a mother estranged from her son entrusted to his father as an alcoholic, but on Max's birthday she shows up at the house to bring his gift: a playpen with an enchanted garden inside.
Despite the ban she takes her son with her to retrieve the dog.
Mia is Gianna's daughter, monitoring her mother from a distance as she is a caregiver to a rich lady while suffering from bouts of bulimia.
Father Bill is an American priest who also practices drug addiction and suicide attempts while his sister joins him from Connecticut to scatter her mother's ashes in Rome's non-Catholic cemetery.
Despite all these protagonists, the real performer is the deserted, suffocating Eternal City, suffocated by an abnormal interminable heat that makes it opaque, blurred and oppressive.
Anxiety also takes shape in this tragic comedy in which there is a lack of air and everyone is a little out of it.
Even in enclosed places, in apartments, in churches, there is a haze: animals are going crazy, and for Gianna "the plague," a metaphor for divine punishment, coincides with the return to the stage of Pupa and her concert:
"the porn star who is supposed to stop the end of the world, she who claims to be a prophetess while inducing fornication...," here are Gianna's ramblings.
Now in the midst of a climate crisis, there is no time to live: there is nothing left to do, only the locust attack is missing.
Pupa, despite the run-up with time tells Gianna what a jerk her husband was, along with all the others who have passed through her bed.
Catherine feels dead inside, despite her day with her son while Bill and his sister exorcise the Oedipal complex with a sacrilegious yet liberating act, dancing La Bamba.
A film crowded with upper middle class, toilets, despair, humidity, haze, darkness, sweaty and disheveled faces and bodies.
Amidst the dead, ashes and increasingly thick fog each wanders in search of fresher air: even the priest knows nothing, nor can he promise anything.
A catalog of human caricatures each can carve out for himself.
The climatic crisis is directly proportional to the existential one, the psychic distress is the outcome of a drifting humanity, the family is the coefficient.
A play, a handful of bewilderment to be carefully distributed, I Told You So, a warning, perhaps a threat, certainly an experience.
Why are we not in one of the "usual crises"? Because it is not "just" an economic crisis. Because it is not "only" an energy crisis. Because it is not "only" a demographic crisis. Because it is not "only" a climate, environmental, ecological crisis. Because it is not "only" a water crisis. Because it is not "only" a waste crisis. The underlying reason lies in the fact that all these crises are closely interconnected.
28-Jan-2024 by Beatrice