La Casa Degli Sguardi
Luca Zingaretti
Drama • 2024 • 1h 49m
Marco is 20 years old and has a great ability to feel, sense, and empathize with the pain of the world. He writes poems and seeks "forgetfulness" in alcohol and drugs, that state of unconsciousness impenetrable even to the anguish of existing and living.
Marco drinks a lot, drinks too much. He is running away from pain, but above all from himself. To live, he must anesthetize, he says. He is incapable of "being" in things unless his blood alcohol level is very high, and he has distanced himself from everyone—friends and girlfriend—who are scared by his desire to destroy himself.
Suffering threatens us from three sides: from our body, which is destined to decay and disintegrate; from the external world, which can attack us with overpowering, ruthless, destructive forces; and finally, from our relationships with other human beings.
(Sigmund Freud)
Marco is the son of a tram driver; his mother, now deceased, lovingly kept his poems as if they were a pure and uncontaminated secret. The absence of his mother leaves an unfillable void, while the father figure, though present, fails to stem the existential shipwreck of the young man.
On Saturdays, Marco goes out with someone, and that someone decides what Marco has to do...
The tension between freedom and control materializes in the compulsive use of alcohol and substances: Marco longs for freedom but chains himself to a self-destructive need that becomes the only way to cope with the pain of living. Poetry, initially an outlet and a promise of beauty, turns into an unbearable testimony of personal failure, to the point of being destroyed in the fire, almost as if to deny the illusion of another possibility.
The film takes shape as a poetic and dramatic exploration of human existence, tracing the path of Marco Tramonti, a young poet fleeing from himself and the pain that permeates his life.
The film poses fundamental questions about the impossibility of redemption and the stubborn search for a meaning that crumbles in the face of the brutality of reality. The car accident, devoid of the chain of custody that would frame and control it, becomes a symbol of existence itself: a chaotic event that finds neither explanation nor repair.
The cleaning cooperative at the hospital represents a sort of contemporary purgatory, a space for possible redemption through work, sharing, and solidarity. Yet Marco moves through it like a suspended soul, unable to take root and accept a routine that does not free him from his inner torment.
Through a popular, highly televisual representation, Zingaretti constructs a narrative that alternates between Roman cynicism and poetic delicacy, as if pain could never entirely abandon its collective dimension. Marco's suffering is both personal and universal, the child of a disillusioned era lacking consoling myths.
'La casa degli sguardi' is not a film of redemption but a portrait of human fragility and the need to endure despite everything. It is a reflection on the dialectical nature of pain and happiness, on the idea that beauty, like the pain of living, hides in the cracks, in acts of mutual care, in the inevitable compromise between what one dreams of and what one becomes... if one manages to become someone or something.
Often have I encountered the pain of living:
it was the choked brook gurgling,
it was the shriveling of the sun-scorched leaf,
it was the horse collapsing.
(Eugenio Montale)
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