Ennio Doris – There’s also tomorrow, the review of the film with Massimo Ghini

Ennio Doris – There is also tomorrow (no, the title is not a retelling of There’s still tomorrow), behind its leitmotif which follows a long hagiography, if you look closely it is a film that wants to exalt the power of ideas. Courageous ideas, which go against the darkest expectations, and which instead fully capture the spirit of a time in which one could still believe in talent. On the other hand, the one directed by Giacomo Campiotti, and taken from There is also tomorrow, a biography dated 2014 and published by Sperling & Kupfer, is a sort of American-style biopic, constructed without flaws and, consequently, free from any type of narrative twist. What does it mean? It begins and continues linearly, supported by different time blocks that alternate history by Ennio Doris.

The challenge, in this case, was to make the figure of a banker human: easy with a personality like that of Ennio Doris who, in his field (and above all in Italy), has somehow managed to leave his mark by focusing everything on empathy (at least judging by Campiotti’s film). Empathetic enough to deserve a biopic? Apparently, yes. Indeed the general construction, which has very little to do with the big screen, and it is a lot very (very) close to the language of the little onefocuses everything on good feelings, on ethics (every now and then it’s necessary), on linguistic accessibility, on the transport of a story made fairy-tale (but didactic) by Campiotti’s screenplay, written together with Carlo Mazzotta and Roberto Vella.

Ennio Doris – There is also tomorrow, the Italian side of the self-made man

The film uses as its basis a socially and economically complicated year, 2008. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Western society sank into a profound crisis. A crisis that affected small savers in particular, and those who had invested securities and savings. What did Doris do at that moment? First of all, Giacomo Campiotti’s film uses the moment to go back in time, tracing both his professional and personal path: from the Venetian countryside to Milan, the door-to-door sales and then the first financial consultancy and the intuition to develop a project that would structure a network in the savings sector.

Hence, the connection with Berlusconi’s Fininvest: his Programma Italia will become Mediolanum in 1994, and then in 1997 Mediolanum Bank. We have summarized in a few lines the central chapter of the film, which then alters Ennio Doris away from the desk: his roots, the relationship with the land, the collective vision of work and, above all, the love with Lina, who will become his wife. We find both playing Ennio Doris Massimo Ghini that Daniel Santantonio (in addition to little Antonio Nicolai), while in the role of Lina there is first Emma Benini and then Lucrezia Lante della Rovere.

But can money buy everything? Maybe not…

So, multiple temporal threads that follow one another in the two-hour duration. A decidedly impressive duration which, it goes without saying, tries to contain Doris’ entire journey. Needless to say, the timing is one of the sore points of the film: probably a more streamlined running time would have made everything more harmonious, and not forced from the point of view of the story, which in any case is not very incisive, and wrapped in the classic patina of chance which, alas, , he just can’t tear himself away from the biopics of our audiovisual production. If the cast convinces (even if we see the always good Massimo Ghini on stage relatively little), it is the staging that often frays under an aesthetic that is truly too televisual (the choice to distribute it to the cinema, on three dates event, is debatable) which, as it can, and in any case driven by a notable participation, paints the epic of a Italian self-made man.

This intuition goes beyond the character narrated by Campiotti: Ennio Doris – There’s Also Tomorrow is in fact a sort of fresco of how talent is often considered dangerous (by those who don’t have it, and by those who are short-sighted), in particular that talent capable of getting closer to people, freeing himself from labels (at least judging by the film) to humanize what instead seems very less than human: money. Because the assonance is quite direct, and resonates in a question that seems to hover over the film: but money can really bring happiness? Without hypocrisy we will answer that they help, but based on the feat of the past of Ennio Doris (it is him we are talking about, after all) it is also important to have the right perspective of one’s means, always aiming to make the best choice and, possibly, free from excessively high interests. The same thing applies to cinema: perhaps less didacticism and less emphasis would have made it Ennio Doris – There is also tomorrow a freer and less canonical biopic.