Le Città di Pianura

 

Alcohol is an anaesthetic that allows us to endure the operation called life. 

George Bernard Shaw 

There is something deeply honest and, at the same time, mildly self-satisfied about Francesco Sossai's cinematic undertaking. Le città di pianura — presented at the 78th Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section — is a film that knows it wants to be important, and this is at once its greatest virtue and its most instructive limitation. 

On the formal level, Sossai constructs something we might call a road movie of immobility: one moves, one proceeds, and one remains exactly where one was. 

The car glides through the Veneto plain, but the movement is purely phenomenological. On the ontological level, the characters are stationary with the precision of those who have decided not to decide. There is something Beckettian in this structure, and Sossai knows it all too well — perhaps too well. 
Waiting for Genio as one waits for Godot, Carlobianchi and Doriano perform the only existential gesture left to them: surviving their own expectation. 

The screenplay, written with Adriano Candiago in an abandoned church in the Pedemontana hills (a biographical detail the director enjoys recounting, and one that already contains an entire poetics of the sacred and the derelict), holds structurally better than it might appear at first glance. Every scene takes the shape of a failed ritual: one goes to the bar for the last drink — it is not the last; one goes to retrieve the treasure buried by Genio — the treasure eludes; one moves toward Giulio's love — the love remains suspended. The film is built as a series of waitings that never close, which is aesthetically coherent but can become, in the hands of a less compliant audience, an experience of suspension not always redeemed by grace. 

Carlobianchi and Doriano are played by Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla with a convincing, almost anthropological physicality. The risk — and here the film occasionally slips — is that the two remain closer to archetype than to individual: they are The Failed Fifty-Somethings, The Veneto That No Longer Exists, The Generation Lost in the Province. Categories that work well as concepts and rather less well as flesh-and-blood people one can care about. 

Giulio, played by Filippo Scotti with an almost excessive delicacy, is the third vertex of a philosophical triangle not without elegance: he who studies architecture — that is to say, the discipline of giving form to the void — meets two men who have made the void their form. The irony is calibrated and it works. That a student of habitable spaces should end up inhabiting that liminal space between night and dawn, between someone else's past and his own future, between the plain and himself, is an intelligent narrative device. Perhaps also a little too intelligent, in the sense that one sees it coming from a distance with the same visibility with which, on the plain, one sees a tractor approaching from two kilometres away. 

The director has stated that the film revolves around three poles: alcohol, friendship, architecture. The programmatic declaration is admirable, and the film honours it — which is already something. Alcohol is never reduced to a moral vice nor celebrated as romantic rebellion: it is the medium through which the characters access a form of oblique truth, a kind of liquid hermeneutics of lived experience. This aspect, clearly inspired by the universe of Kaurismäki and the twilight minimalism of Jarmusch, is among the film's most accomplished achievements, and brings back with a certain nostalgia the memory of that truly surprising film, Feathers by Omar El Zohairy, in which a chicken manages to steal every scene. 

Friendship, of the plains variety, however, remains somewhat in the background of its own mythology. It is not shown in its daily texture or its tensions: it is evoked, mourned, celebrated in absentia. Genio — the friend who fled — is a ghost character who structures the entire narrative without ever having to earn his own centrality. He is the Treasure that cannot be seen, the Meaning that is never declared, the Promise that is never kept. He functions as a metaphorical device. He functions rather less well as a human being. 

Architecture, finally, is the most fascinating and the least developed conceptual key. The idea that a study of spatial form might enter into dialogue with the formless existence of the two protagonists is philosophically rich. That Giulio studies the design of cities while driving through a plain where cities seem never to have been truly designed — or where they were designed and then abandoned to their fate as sprawling periphery — is a tension the film grazes rather than explores. 

Here one must be honest with the reader: Le città di pianura has a genuine ambition of meaning, but one that at times folds back on itself with a touch too much self-satisfaction. The film seems to want to say that we live in a post-urban age, that the cities of the Veneto plain have never truly been inhabited in the fullest sense, that the lost generations of the 2000s burned their futures in small-time schemes and large-scale drinking, that the only answer to the question of life's meaning is to keep ordering the last drink — because the last drink is the only truly gratuitous, truly free, truly useless and therefore truly human act. 

It is a beautiful thought. It is also a thought that Beckett, Carver, Bukowski and a few others had already expressed with less awareness of their own elegance — and perhaps precisely for that reason with greater force. Sossai's problem is not intelligence: it is that one hears all too clearly the sound of bricks being laid, the conceptual architecture being constructed with visible care. The film is a well-built edifice. What it lacks, at times, is that unforeseeable crack through which the real light enters. 

Le città di pianura is a film that deserves to be discussed, perhaps revisited. It is a coherent work, and that alone is already news. Sossai has an authentic eye for the province, for ageing male friendship, for the Veneto as interior landscape as much as geographical one. 

And yet the film risks being overrated — and in certain cinephile circles it already seems to be — because it carries with it that veneer of European auteur cinema that knows it must please those who know how European auteur cinema is made. The plain is flat by definition. The question that remains open, and that is perhaps the most interesting one the film poses without meaning to pose it, is: at what point does the plain become a metaphor, and at what point does the metaphor become the plain? 

The first glass is for thirst, the second for joy, the third for pleasure, the fourth for madness. Apuleius