Un film fatto per Bene

A work of art is never finished: it is abandoned."
— Paul Valery


The set is like an initiatory ritual (or sacred self-sabotage)
 Everything begins like a documentary, or almost. But the machinery of cinema jams: delays, endless takes, exasperated producers, and Maresco shouting “filmicide” before evaporating — an almost mystical act, as if the real film were to disappear rather than to shoot. Umberto Cantone emerges as an existential detective, collecting witnesses, narrating and confronting — doing so in a way so surreal that it feels more like a metacinematic exorcism than an investigation.

Carmelo Bene is not a name, he is a deranged neuron: he resonates like an oracle of the apocalypse, and it is no coincidence that his warning cuts like a blade: “The worst thing is to die without understanding to what extent humans are screwed.”
A thought that seems written by Céline: “art cannot save the world,” imbued with that scent of cataclysm that offers no redemption. The brilliant, invisible artist becomes ghost, detonator, living metaphor. “Cinema is dead, it doesn’t exist: it is the stunt double of itself” — and in this epitaph echoes the tragic resonance of technical modernity, that era of the revenge of the mediocre. We believed in art and cinema, now all that remains is a film like this: offered to all, but understood by very few.

Between farce, tragedy, Dionysian cocktail, Antonio Rezza plays Death in a Shakespearean chess match; actors performing “terribly,” a dwarf and a Pulcinella dancing beside a bonfire, a donkey named Carmelo bursting in like an epiphany, a nod to Pasolini’s La Ricotta, a mix redolent of absurd theater, apocalyptic carnival. Meanwhile, Francesco Puma — body and symbol — moves like the incarnation of the void into which we have been delivered. Beside him, Marzullo with his Coca-Cola and popcorn, emblem of an entertainment that domesticates everything, even the unrepresentable.

The representable and its ghost: the film challenges the paradox: what is representable is already corrupted, what is not slips into the abyss. Signifier and meaning chase each other in a cruel game, until one discovers that each is a parody of the other. Here cinema transforms into an exercise in de-ordering and de-thinking (neologisms seemingly born from a night of philosophical fever), a continuous sabotage of logic that strips the gaze and leaves it bare before the void.

Maresco seems to repeat, emphasize, almost shout: “Things don’t turn out well if you don’t suffer.” And in that suffering lies the purest creative act: failure becomes epiphany. It is a film that poisons and heals at the same time, a chalice offering not consolation but a vertigo of truth. The editing, the blackened neon cinematography, the resonant sounds, the melancholic jazz of Salvatore Bonafede — everything converges in a darkness that pulses and shines.

A political and poetic act that is neither gratuitous nor folkloric: it is memory, a poisonous celebration. Dedicated to Goffredo Fofi, the film pays homage to a militant intellectual and declares itself a manifesto: cinema is never neutral, it is a revolutionary act.

If Un film fatto per Bene were a metaphysical cocktail, it would be a Martinez from hell: dark red vermouth like obsession, citrusy gin like intellectual sarcasm, Nero d’Avola reduction like burning earth. It is a drink you do not want, yet cannot put down. Once consumed, there is no return: only delirium, abyss, and intertwined beauty.

“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except to truly escape from hell.”
— Antonin Artaud