Can I tell you a secret? How many times did it happen, when we were little, to do one confidence to the ear of a person dear to us, something that had been kept hidden until that moment? Locked in one of the many rooms of our mind, perhaps even with a double lock. She shared the “misdeed” with someone else, and she did it to make herself feel bigger. It was all dictated by innocence, untainted by the worry that that secret might backfire, because one had not yet been influenced by the outside world. Nevertheless a secret, when you are an adultdepending on how you see it, as well as its actual severity, it can affect an entire existence.
Especially if we become victims of a society that allows everything except making us comfortable with ourselves and with our somewhat defective nature, so much so that we can be sincere with who we are. And then all that remains is to transform, trying in every way to erase the true self, making itself that secret that should never be leaked. Simply because in the meantime we have built a different image for ourselves, and we want it to remain intact. AND Confidencethe new film by Daniele Luchetti, it starts right here. Written together with Francesco Piccolo, the director’s feature film is the third adaptation of a novel by Domenico Starnone after La scuola and Lacci. Arrives in theaters from April 24th distributed by Vision Distribution. In the cast Elio Germano, Federica Rosellini, Victoria Puccini And Pilar Fogliati.
Confidence, the plot
Pietro Vella is a high school literature teacher and is very successful. The students all respect him, and his approach in the classroom is different from that of other teachers. He applies the “pedagogy of affection”, an expression that will also be the thematic fulcrum of an essay which, in the near future, will lead him to have some success. Meanwhile, in one of the classes he attends, Pietro is very enraptured by Teresa, a talented girl with whom, once she finishes school, he will begin a rather particular relationship. Until one evening, after discovering his betrayal with another woman, the young woman proposes an exchange: telling each other a secret that they have never revealed to anyone else, so that this binds them forever. After an initial hesitation, Pietro accepts. But once pronounced, Teresa’s face stiffens: she looks out on the balcony and tells him that what she confided in him could destroy him. The next day, Pietro will discover that Teresa has left him, but the fear that she might reveal what she confessed will torment him for the rest of his life and she will become her worst nightmare.
A film of images
The focal point of Luchetti’s new film it is without a shadow of a doubt Pietro Vella. An ambiguous character, whose dual nature will be understood later in the writing, when the triggering incident arrives (quite late in the story) which will plunge the protagonist into the vortex of anguish. If in terms of writing we have confirmation of the “double” only later, in terms of image we have the first signs from the first shots. One of the best works of Confidence in fact, it concerns precisely the use of light, which symbolically represents Peter’s ambivalence. In more than one scene the teacher played by Elio Germano he is shot with his face in dim light or partially illuminated. An expressive solution that fully restores a man split in half: on the one hand confident, concrete, on the other hand weak, terrified of his own truths.
Who has his black areas, in which he navigates in agony, and which no one sees except Teresa, the only one aware of who he really is, and those of light – in apparent reality – where he appears calm and resolute, esteemed and praised by everyone just like want. Luchetti, thanks to the screenplay created with Francesco Piccolo and a painstaking work on the subtext, builds the fresco of a person, rather than a man, moved by the fear of revealing his moral identity, within which his thousand different nuances merge , which however are suffocated in order to appear brilliant in the eyes of a society which, we now know well, requires every single individual to adhere to a universal model in which one is always performing, full of success, without defects. Because only in this way can one be accepted. Only in this way can we exist in the world. And so even the smallest, most innocuous secret, if it can undermine that paradigm, can be a disturbing element.
A reflection on the fear of being yourself
Pietro Vella, therefore, cannot afford to be himself. He can’t afford to be just a normal person. He can’t and, in the end, he doesn’t want to either. Getting naked, dropping the mask, slipping off the clothes of impeccability is now impossible. He is dominated by it. Yet that confessed secret could do just that. So the director, like a mortal Charon, it ferries the spectator into the abyss that is the human soul, in this case that of the protagonist, showing him all his facets, made up of anguish, torment, blind fear of judgement, to the point of leaving him on the opposite shore with many dark thoughts. In this, Luchetti does a visually exemplary job: in telling a reality that is fundamentally common to many, he creates imaginary glimpses in the narration of reality, almost like the visions of Pietro himself, in which his deepest disturbances and most sinful desires emerge. And in which his true state of mind is revealed, it breaks out quickly and violently, generating an emotional tension of great impact, especially because it is strengthened and underlined by the music and songs by Thom Yorke, which blend well with the dramatic tone of the scene.
It is clear, therefore, that Confidence be a cinema of reflection and stomach aches. A film that leads us to ask ourselves why we live in other people’s and social expectations, but also in those that we build ourselves, condemning ourselves to a sort of eternal damnation. We all allow ourselves, some more or less, to be paralyzed and intimidated by the perception that others have of us, which is indeed changeable and subordinate to the information they receive, but not for this reason decisive to the point of being our balance in life. . Yet if we hide behind fear, if we always and only wear the mask of perfection, neutralizing the rest, we cannot define ourselves as real or true people. But only puppets conditioned and manipulated by a life that does not belong to us.
Tags: Confidence review film Daniele Luchetti
