Starting from the end, the effect the film has is an integral part of the film. From the vision of “Civil war” by Alex GarlandIn fact, you emerge petrified (in a positive sense: beware of the extreme), disoriented, concentrated. And the impression is that it is not a subjective thing, of this or that spectator. From the first to the last frame the silence in front of the screen is total: no forgotten cell phone turned on, no rustling to find something in the bag, no whispering to a friend, no one getting up. Any background noise disappears when faced with a film from which all the things that are not necessary for a lean, implacable narration, without rhetoric, without moral lessons, without consolation, without goodness that does not also have its own advantage, as often it happens in the real world, and without malice other than the inevitable product of the descent into a whirlpool into which anyone could fall, if they do not watch over themselves to keep the light of conscience, of free choice, of introspection, of awareness, on. And in the end the spectator is left speechless because this film says it all and says it without frills: life, death, ambition, compassion, ambiguity, growth, involution, competition, love, pain, transformation and fall, leadership and gregarious tendency. Without explaining, without justifying, without saving.
Starting from the end, the effect the film has is an integral part of the film. From the vision of “Civil war” by Alex GarlandIn fact, you emerge petrified (in a positive sense: beware of the extreme), disoriented, concentrated. And the impression is that it is not a subjective thing, of this or that spectator. From the first to the last frame the silence in front of the screen is total: no forgotten cell phone turned on, no rustling to find something in the bag, no whispering to a friend, no one getting up. Any background noise disappears when faced with a film from which all the things that are not necessary for a lean, implacable narration, without rhetoric, without moral lessons, without consolation, without goodness that does not also have its own advantage, as often it happens in the real world, and without malice other than the inevitable product of the descent into a whirlpool into which anyone could fall, if they do not watch over themselves to keep the light of conscience, of free choice, of introspection, of awareness, on. And in the end the spectator is left speechless because this film says it all and says it without frills: life, death, ambition, compassion, ambiguity, growth, involution, competition, love, pain, transformation and fall, leadership and gregarious tendency. Without explaining, without justifying, without saving.
It is an impressive film in its formidable ability to show through subtraction and not redundancy. And therefore not for the harsh – and beautiful – scenes of urban and non-urban guerrilla warfare; not for the arbitrary, karst, creeping violence that pervades the hallucinated cities of an America (but it could be any place) transfigured in the version of a little future compared to a today with dystopian potential. But what we see is not dystopian, in reality. It could already be here, and perhaps it already is in various forms, that lost or regressed humanity that is encountered along the ferocious journey undertaken by the four protagonists: two expert reporters, a novice reporter willing to do anything without almost realizing it, a elderly reporter not willing to do anything in the best sense of the term. They are the witnesses of a human tragedy-comedy that is indeed “on the road” – the post-apocalyptic novel “On the Road” by Cormack McCarthy may have been inspiring in the atmosphere, but, depending on the eye of the beholder, the Coen brothers or Stanley Kubrick or Tim Burton’s hostile fairy-tale scenarios might have been too. It doesn’t matter, what is “on the street” is also deeply internal, as it is always filtered by the digital eye – video camera, still camera, cell phone. An organ as real as a real eye, more real than the wide-eyed gaze of the victims thrown among the rags, a macabre copy of a work by Pistoletto, and more than the grin of the executioners accustomed to Russian roulette meat. But who is the real executioner? we wonder as the civil war of the title spreads, sipped at every petrol pump lost in thin air. Which is just an assumption, a piece of service information: there are the separatist states of California and Texas and there is an army of loyalists defending an ectoplasmic president hunted down in Washington. Who is right and who is wrong is not known and does not matter.
There is no answer, everyone is guilty and innocent in their own way, so much so that civil war might not even exist, and perhaps that humanity would be like this anyway. This is how humanity can become if it does not watch over itself in every minute of every single life, each different but equally capable of falling into its own small or large hell. The only thing that remains (or that matters) to the four protagonists is to escape, escape from themselves too, and take the photo that allows them to at least believe in their own existence. But the only thing that remains for those who watch is not that, and perhaps there is a way out. The film doesn’t say, it indicates, and by dint of subtracting it makes you bang your head.
