Open Roads ’24: Adagio

No matter how old they get, aging gangsters like Cammello are always going to be dangerous. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t still be alive. Despite their differences, they will do their best to protect a teenaged boy from the crooked cop he knows too much about in Stefano Sollima’s Adagio, which screens during this year’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.

With fires raging outside the city limits, Rome looks like it is on the brink of an apocalypse. Even if it is the end of the world, Vasco and his extralegal task-force want to film a high-profile politician engaged in compromising sexual acts at an Eyes Wide Shut-style orgy. They intend to use Manuel to get it. Having arrested him for solicitation, they will expose him at school and in his neighborhood, unless he cooperates. However, when Manuel notices the many cameras recording the party’s debauchery, he gets spooked and flees.

Realizing he is a threat to Vasco, Manuel takes refuge with blind Polniuman, a former colleague of his ex-gangster father Daytona, in a now defunct Roman criminal syndicate. Polniuman is as shrewd as ever, but he never muscle even when he could see, so he sends the teenager to Cammello, who is still a grizzled bull of a man. He and Daytona had a bitter falling out, but Polniuman knows he won’t turn the young boy away.

Sollima is responsible for the worst Tom Clancy adaptation ever, Without Remorse, which showed zero understanding of what his books were all about (here’s a hint: the U.S. military are supposed to be the good guys). However, he totally gets Italian gangster dramas. Adagio is gritty as heck and achingly tragic. The nights are hot and humid, while the sky disconcertingly glows, thanks to the smoke from the fires. That all makes an especially potent setting for film noir. Incidentally, the way he and cinematographer Paolo Carnera depict the crimson Roman skies is no exaggeration. Take it from someone who was in New York last year for the orange atmosphere resulting from Canada’s out of control forest fires.

While Adagio is far from perfect (frankly, Manuel is a big nothing of a character), it is super-stylish and Pierfrancesco Favino is massively hardnosed as Cammello. Favino is physically imposing, but his screen-presence is even larger. You would hardly recognize him from The War Machine, but he can play a strong silent type on land as well as at sea.

Open Roads ’24: A Brighter Tomorrow

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) received direct financial support from the Soviet Union, so obviously they had no independence whatsoever. They refused to condemn the terrorism of the Red Army Faction and parroted Party propaganda demonizing democracy advocates during the Hungarian Revolution and the Czechoslovakian invasion. Inevitably, many prominent members broke from the Party in ’56 and ’68, but the PCI stayed loyal to its Soviet masters as an institution. The PCI’s massive hypocrisy is ripe for savage mockery, but that is absolutely not happening in Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow, which screens during this year’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.

As usual, Moretti plays a filmmaker not so different from himself. Giovanni yearns to make an Italian adaption of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” but his current film is a story of a neighborhood PCI club, who are hosting a Hungarian circus troupe, right as the Soviet tanks roll into Hungary.

Giovanni conceived his film as a musical, vaguely in an Umbrellas of Cherbourg bag, using sentimental old Italian pop songs. He wants to evoke nostalgia for the glory days of PCI clubs, so Giovanni needs to somewhat whitewash the PCI’s history. As director of A Brighter Tomorrow, the real-life Moretti is clearly trying to rehabilitate the real-life PCI. Consequently, the film runs interference for Italian Communists on multiple meta-levels.

When not excusing away an oppressive ideology, A Brighter Tomorrow engages in self-indulgently neurotic rom-com humor. This film should inspire fresh new respect for Woody Allen, because his angsty, nebbish, classic movie-loving, frustrated artist shtick is obviously harder than it looks.

A Brighter Tomorrow had tremendous potential for satire, but Moretti openly engages in wish-fulfillment, creating a PCI rebellion against CCP orthodoxy that literally never happened. You have to wonder what the legendary Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr (who worked extensively with Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrzej Wajda) really and truly thinks of Moretti’s final cut. In this film, Stuhr plays the Polish ambassador, who happens to be the much older boyfriend of Giovanni’s college student daughter Emma, so keep those Woody Allen comparisons coming.

Open Roads ’24: The War Machine

It is a shame Lt. Commander Salvatore Todaro did not live to see Italy switch sides in WWII, because he probably could have worked well with the Allies. Todaro might be the only Axis officer who is remembered for saving lives and this is the most notable example. Todaro and his crew truly deliver full service when they first sink the Kabalo, a Belgian freighter, and then rescue all 26 survivors in Edoardo De Angelis’s The War Machine (a.k.a. Comandante), which screens as the opening night selection of this year’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.

As the film opens, Todaro’s damaged body raises questions whether he can continue to serve. Frankly, his wife would not mind caring for him for the rest of their lives, but he just cinches himself up and heads out on another tour aboard the submarine, the Comandante Cappelli.

Todaro’s practice of yoga and meditation are obviously quite unusual for an Italian Naval officer in 1940, but it helps explain his free-thinking humanism. He is also one of the best skippers in the Italian navy. When his crew detects the Belgian-flagged Kabalo, Todaro methodically hunts it down. Technically, Belgium was a neutral country, but the cargo ship was indeed carrying arms to England. How it managed to even get that far must have been a minor miracle, considering Belgium was occupied by Germany on May 28, 1940.

Of course, Todaro’s standing orders were to disregard survivors and get right back to the hunt. Instead, the Comandante gave all 26 Belgians shelter inside the Comandante Cappelli, agreeing to ferry them to safe international shipping lanes, even though that exposed his boat to considerable danger.

Todaro’s “good fascist” credentials can be debated till the swallows fly home, but the “separate peace” aspects of the Kabalo story (which largely happened the way De Angelis and co-screenwriter Sandro Veronesi suggest) ought to resonate with pacifists and conflict resolution workshop hucksters. It is a heck of a story that challenges our preconceived notions of mercy, gratitude, and loyalty. De Angelis clearly wants viewers to ask themselves how they would act were they members of either the Italian or Belgian crews.

However, this is definitely not the second coming of Neo-Realism. Frankly, the early scene of Todaro and his crew singing a sailors’ hymn in unison as the march to their sub, while the “independent contractors” working the docks wish their clients well, runs a real risk of glorifying fascism. Still, it is good cinema.