There are two Bad Movies of the week: Gloria! and Flaminia, at the cinema from 11 April.
Premise
And thank goodness There’s still tomorrow by Paola Cortellesi had convinced someone that Italians were hungry for stories of female emancipation. Of course. On April 11, two very different films were released at the cinema in Italy with the only common denominator being the protagonism of women, both as directors and in the story. It’s about Gloria! by Margherita Vicario and Flaminia by Michela Giraud. They are also two films directed by those who have not always frequented cinema on a personal level. Vicario (born 1988), daughter of the director of I Cesaroni, comes from the world of music even though she has acted since she was a young girl, directs short films and appears in small roles in films and dramas. Giraud (born in 1987) wanted to be a dramatic actress as a child but she discovered herself a successful comedian somewhat by chance (Satire Award 2020) and she became a star as a stand-up comedian with the first season of LoL – Whoever laughs is out (2021). The two ladies’ films are different but ambitious. Vicario, thanks to the presence in the production of Tempesta chaired by Carlo Cresto-Dina, goes in the direction of Alice Rohrwacher and with Gloria! immediately enters the competition in one of the five most important events in the world in terms of the seventh art, namely the Competition at the 74th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival. Giraud instead chooses the more commercial route, thanks to the financiers Eagle Original, Pepito Produzioni and Vision Distribution, with an autobiographical metropolitan comedy about the bourgeois environment of Northern Rome.
Glory!
The title is not a proper name like in the famous diptych signed Sebastián Lelio but a religious song. There is an exclamation point as in the Italian edition of Poor Creatures! by Yorgos Lanthimos. The protagonists are young women isolated from the world who in a women’s college at the end of the 18th century have to perform in a concert for Pius VII (Pope from 1800 to 1823) who sees them as mere performers. Usually the author is the priest at the head of the institute named Perlina (Paolo Rossi) but this time ours is in a creative crisis. What music will be played for Pius VII if the score is missing? At that point Vicario creates a film similar to Dead Poets Society (1989) by Peter Weir in which the girls meet at night because the “mute” of the group Teresa (Galatea Bellugi) has discovered a piano with which to start experimenting, before Elvis and Beatles, strange sounds close to rhythm and blues and jazz. Between young friendships, rivalries will be born (Carlotta Gamba is the top of the Lucia class who will come into conflict with the rebellious Teresa) and the desire to make the men of the pontificate (which rhymes with patriarchy) hear different musical notes. Will this experience be able to form a cohesive group? Understood both in a political and artistic sense?
Flaminia
The title is both the name of a consular road that connects Lazio to the lively Romagna coast and of a modern-day woman from Northern Rome, born Flaminia De Angelis. Giraud plays her, she is the daughter of economic well-being (“My father remakes asses” in the sense of cosmetic surgery) but she is a worse prisoner than Vicario’s late eighteenth-century girls. She practically cannot eat because she is already more corpulent than her “thread-like” friends, she always has to dress well (if she is sloppy someone asks: “Are you by any chance going to a CGIL demonstration?”) And in 15 days she will get married to the very rich Alberto Du Rutier. Suddenly, her sister Ludovica (Rita Abela), who is twice her size but less repressed than her, comes into her house, suffering from the autistic spectrum: she eats as much as she wants, dresses as she likes and doesn’t like formalities affected by clubs. private and noble dinners.
In the protagonist Flaminiaas soon as the troublesome and problematic Ludovica lands at the De Angelis house, the same annoyance as Tom Cruise returns in Rain Man (1988) as Barry Levinson when he learns that his father has left a $3 million inheritance to his autistic older brother Raymond played by Dustin Hoffman. Then in the second part a magical thing happens: Ludovica’s increasingly stimulating company induces Flaminia to change consular path, to go back to hanging out in places in Rome that are very far from the North, both geographical and metaphorical. What is in this now more mysterious woman’s past that we viewers didn’t know about? And why does Giraud completely change his style to move from farce to the more intimate comedy of family drama?
The comedian is a symbol
Vicario wants to remind us that the woman between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century did not easily appear at the time either as a musical author (Vivaldi often drew from the talent of anonymous musicians) or as an intellectual (the importance of the proto-feminist thinker is emphasized in the chatter of the girls Madame de Staël). To shoot a comedy with a male prevaricator yes but slightly behind the gas pipe and therefore a little buffoonish he chooses excellent comic authors to surround the female protagonist such as an excellent Paolo Rossi (Perlina), Stefano Belisari aka Elio and Natalino Balasso. Good idea. Giraud instead wants to be ironic about his biography (the presence of his sister is already in the funny monologue uploaded to Netflix in 2022 The truth, I swear!), about the female hierarchies of Northern Rome (nothing but the autistic spectrum: Flaminia’s friends seem like ghosts from films horror) and of the liberation from a supposed charmed life that our protagonist has suffered rather than chosen. Vicario’s women are oppressed by the male. Giraud’s woman is oppressed by the female or herself. She also uses highly symbolic comedians such as the rude left-handed Antonello Fassari (one of the first Italian rappers who in 1984 inspired the young Piotta with Romadinotte) and the walker with a heart of gold from the Roman coast Enzo “Er Cipolla” Salvi who appears in Flaminia in legendary second part as an innkeeper and silent ally who only says: “Finally”. He says the line when Flaminia orders a nice plate of pasta at her restaurant after she has seen even just 200 grams of carbohydrate as actual suicide throughout the film.
Conclusions
Cortellesi effect? But where? On one of the most depressing weekends of the year where no film reached a million, Gloria! debuts in seventh place with 147 thousand euros while Flaminia brings up the rear of the top ten with only 78 thousand euros in four days. It is as usual disconcerting, as in the days of Pills and Jackal, that Giraud’s tangible success in the last 4 years has not stimulated part of his audience to carry out that now revolutionary act (especially for Italian films) of going and getting detached a ticket to the cinema perhaps on the first weekend of the arrival of the work of one of your favorites who you would like to see continue working. Vicario plays within the arthouse (Rohrwacher’s debut Corpo celeste didn’t even make 300 thousand in total but it was much less pop than Gloria!) and with a good competition in Berlin (even better Gloria! than the limp draft of Black Mirror Another End by Piero Messina (also competing in Germany) can be considered satisfied for what we hope is a long-term issue. From Giraud, and above all from her audience, something more was definitely expected also because the Roman author was good, courageous and played the ace of Rita Abela in the role of her sister Ludovica who we would like to be nominated for the David 2025 already Now. What happens now? We will probably see various marketing analyzes on sites, social message boards and those paper magazines still alive where, as usual with the wisdom of the next day, we will read irritating little lessons on film promotion with advice, reprimands and explanations of winning recipes. Unfortunately, however, it is always the same story: in Italy the cinema audience is totally random, at the mercy of events and atmospheric agents, devoid of drive, ideological ardor or personal passion. The Cortellesi collection was a pure anomaly and therefore impossible to normalize and create as a model. It was thought that the 36 million euros of There’s still tomorrowas well as (to varying degrees) the astonishing 3 million-odd Past Lives by Celine Song, were the driving force for greater interest in female stories in the box office of our country. Unfortunately it was just a wishful thinking. We didn’t expect monstrous debuts for Glory! And Flaminia but two such interesting and beautiful films definitely deserved something more.
Whose fault is it this time?
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Tags: Cortellesi Effect exist Glorias cinema Flaminia flopped box office Bad Movie Cinema
