Highly anticipated special event (out of competition) at the Cannes Film Festival, «Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga» takes us back to the bombastic post-apocalyptic world of George Millerwhich with this prequel/spin-off resumes the story of «Fury Road» without leaving aside (it’s worth saying) anything about that great film, epochal in its own way, released nine years ago. The plot, for what matters at least in mythopoetic terms, sees at its center the young Furiosa, who as the world collapses, is torn from the Green Place of the Many Mothers, falling into the hands of a large horde of motorcyclists led by the Warlord Dementus. Exploring the Wastelands, they come across the Citadel presided over by Immortan Joe. As the two tyrants battle for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials while she scrapes together the means to find her way home.
Compared to «Fury Road» the narrative becomes more complex, the character more ambiguous and one gets the feeling that in general Miller wants to delve deeper into this aspect. This can be seen from the story of the protagonist, who literally lives many lives and never resigns herself to the course of events, just as the construction of the villain is more studied (with very well-chosen self-parodic accents), both embodied by the silent and monumental “masks” of the couple of divas Taylor-Joy/Hemsworth. Having said this, the rest is a pure concentrate of the Miller Style, that is, a muscular and very acidic ride in the imaginative lands of Westeland: violence and action, epic and western, motors and music, metalanguage and inventions visual-sound, all concentrated in the attempt to explode the cinematic image to free it and make it win over the narrative itself, taking us elsewhere again. «Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga» has the same dirty, dark and unrepeatable power that its protagonist releases and will not (hopefully) be serializable. Because it is (still) pure cinema.
Direction: George Miller; Interpreters: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth; Film script: Nick Lathouris, George Miller; Photography: Simon Duggan; Music: Junkie XL; Scenography: Colin Gibson; Distribution: Warner Bros. USA, 2024, 148′.
In Florence it is in these rooms: Fiamma, Giunti Odeon, Marconi, Portico, The Space, Uci.
