Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 10:06 pm 
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Sergio Castellitto and Anita Kravos in Raise Your Head

A plot that spins out of control

As the reviewer for Screen Daily wrote when it debuted in Europe last year, this movie about a working class Roman who wants to make his teenage son into a good boxer feels like it might become something great -- but then throws it away in the second half with changes of characters and a contrived ending. But of course the focused, always professional Sergio Castellitto, hands down one of the best Italian screen actors of the past three decades, makes Mero, the dad, intense and real throughout. And that is the reason for watching a story that otherwise goes haywire.

Mero (Castellitto) has this tall boy Lorenzo (the promising Gabriele Campanelli) on his hands to make something of, his one great love and abiding souvenir from a fling with a flighty Albanian blond. Mero himself was a failure as an amateur fighter but he has a desperate hunger to succeed through Lorenzo. He also has a lot of hostility toward practically everybody else, including Lorenzo's mother (Pia Lanciotti), Malagodi (Giorgio Colangeli), the gym boss he reluctantly turns Lorenzo over to when it's obvious he's taught him all he can, and later a young Romanian girl Lorenzo gets involved with (Laura Ilie).

Boxing movies always have that classic working class feel, that intensity of focus, the rhythm of the footwork and the jabs, the crowds, the lights, the sweat. This is an arena of hopes and dreams, hard knocks, failures, and the survival of the fittest. There's something wrong with Mero. His firecracker personality will lead to disaster for Lorenzo, whereupon the movie goes spiraling out of control. Maybe there was something wrong with the whole conception, if it has to be abandoned midstream for something else.

Alessandro Angelini knows how to do something right. This is the second time Angelini has made a movie whose star got the Best Actor prize at Rome. His 2006 debut Salty Air , which also featured a complicated father-son relationship, got that for Giorgio Colangeli. Here Castellitto got it, again at Rome. Nice for Roman-born Angelini and Castellitto.

The writing is another matter. Raise Your Head/Alza la testa disoslves into too many different plots. And to begin with, there are flaws in the conceptions of the characters that may be why they spin away long before the film's done. Mero is too unstable. He brings out disaster, and then goes into an obsessive spin to make up for the loss of his boy. And what of Lorenzo? The writing makes Mero so dominant it's hard for him to emerge at all, and small moments are out of wack -- knocking things around in the dining room on the night before a fight and then, on his first day with the outside coach, almost afraid to go in on his own. There was no reason to make him quite so immature.

Be that as it may, the opening sequences focus the audience's attention and emotions on Mero and Lorenzo and on their big project: making a good fighter out of the boy. When that's thrown away in the middle, we feel betrayed and Raise Your Head becomes rudderless.

Castellitto is a wonderful actor to watch from movie to movie. He can be an Italian cook full of joie-de-vivre; an ex-lover mad at his girlfriend who wants him back too late; a doctor with desperate problems; he can be Inspector Maigret in a TV series or the complex protagonist of films by Rivette or Bellocchio. He is the consummate professional, the actor's actor. But he's not really a star. He might look like diminutive Jean Gabin, but he lacks Gabin's immense presence. And just think of Mastroianni (or Gassman). He's no matinee idol. He has no special aura. He just goes from movie to movie, whether it be Italian, French, German, or American, delivering the goods. He does great work. But the suave professionalism means that je ne sais quoi is lacking, that grace beyond the reach of art. If that could have helped.

The important thing about Campanelli, who plays Lorenzo, is his lanky, loose physicality. He looks like a young Adrien Brody with a toothy smile and he has an openness that's so natural he doesn't seem to be acting. He seems passive, but bursts into life during his big fight. The scene is flashy and dramatic; and the sequence where Mero has to celebrate with his older friends, getting drunk and dancing around in an empty club while Lorenzo is out with a girl, has a sad poetry that's memorable. Cinematographer Amaldo Catinari uses a hand-held camera to achieve immediacy and nervous energy. Angelini has style and knows how to deliver emotion. But it goes wrong with the screenplay, which was written by Angelini with Angelo Carbone and Francesca Marciano. Raise Your Head must be remembered as an interesting failure.

Raise Your Head/Alza la testa, 87 min, produced by RAI Cinema, in Italian, debuted at the Rome Film Festival October 17 and opened theatrically in Italy November 6. It is being shown in various international and US Italian film series and was seen and reviewed as part of the San Francisco Film Society's New Italian Cinema series with showings on Wednesday, November 17, 8:45 pm and Friday, November 19, 6:30 pm. at Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema.

Reviews in Variety and Hollywood Reporter agree that the scenario's detour midway wrecks what might have been a very good film.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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