“First times” in love with cinema. And who forgets them. This is the title of the new MOW column dedicated to emerging cinema by a young aspiring film critic, Ilaria Ferretti. How many actors, directors and screenwriters are there in Italy under 35 who are never talked about? Too many. And then we start to get to know them. Opening the dance is “Troppo Azzurro”, written, directed and starring Filippo Barbagallo. This is what the movie everyone’s talking about really looks like
Tvery light blue written, directed and starring Filippo Barbagallo, it is the story of Dario, 25 years old, a Roman boy still clinging to his balance as a teenager who has never left his home and has had the same friends since high school. During the summer Dario meets Caterina (Alice Benvenuti), a girl he met in the emergency room and then Laura, “the unattainable” (Martina Gatti). Too blue Is this yet another comedy we didn’t need? Absolutely not, and a more powerful debut for its author, director and performer was not possible. Criticism brings him closer to a young man Nanni Moretti, but does he really look like him? Not really, in common with the director of Ecce Bombo only Angelo Barbagallo, Filippo’s father and Moretti’s historic producer who, with him, founded Sacher Film back in 1987, has the merit of having managed, like Monteverde’s director, to talk about himself and his peers in a phase of life in which everyone is fulfilled and someone stops and believes they are lost forever but they are not. Filippo Barbagallo said in an interview: “My first film is like a light beer about the difficulty of growing up”. And in part it is like this. You have the sensation of seeing Too blue to see a series of signs, symbols which in turn refer to something we know, to feelings that we, twenty-five year olds, understand without mincing words. “The first time, when I was looking for a sign in everything I saw, and it seemed to me that nothing was gray and squalid enough for how I felt. Even now my gaze was only looking for signs; I had never been able to see anything else. Signs of what? Signs that referred to each other endlessly.” (Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves)
THEThe director says he wrote a film thinking about a typical conversation with his friends, he acted trying to be closer to how it is in reality, always investigating a certain lightness. In Too blue we also talk about change, about the fear of taking a leap into the void, about trees which, unlike us poor men, do not have to adapt to the new life that changes. And then, finally, an undeniable desire to experiment shines through, not caring about possible errors, about senseless thoughts, and thus build wonderful images, like the visual game that appears immediately after the love scene between Dario and Caterina, in which the two they are divided into several boxes. One gets the impression that Filippo behind the camera and Dario in the film are two men who are not so different but above all aware of the desire to go further, to do something new for the seventh art, for themselves and for us spectators. Barbagallo is also there in the models he looks at Woody Allen yes, and many say it, yet leaving aside thousands of other possible references, it remains Too blue a breath of fresh air for Italian cinema and also a nice magnifying glass on who we are, in our middle age, and happy? In the film Dario returns to Rome and reads The eye by Nabokov and repeats to himself: “The only happiness in this world lies in observing, spying, supervising, examining oneself and others, in being nothing but a large glassy eye, slightly bloodshot.” Dario is enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture, he has the same close friend as always (Brando Pacitto) and two girls who hang around him, he is very cute, he also has two parents (Valerio Mastandreawho seems to have handed him an old masterpiece, Everybody on the ground, and Valeria Milillo) who cuddle and love him. Yet he doesn’t know if he is happy. And it’s normal for this to be the case. They call us the generation that has everything and has many choices, and it’s partly true. But happiness is a more complex matter.
Tvery light blue it’s a film that you watch with a smile on your face on our lips from the first to the last minute, because it seems to be a friend of ours who is making his debut with this work on the big screen. His dramas, his insecurities which are not due to family discomfort or a specific pain to overcome, are the perfect reflection of those who, at twenty-five, feel they are not completely happy and don’t even know why. And this is where Allen’s bittersweetness returns, between timid laughter and harsh questions about who we are and what we want.
He remained by the window without crying
And while dancing he started writing
Magic words and meaningless thoughts
Nor attitude
Mysterious details like that
(D’Annunzio, Pop
Self Too blue if it were music it would come from Pop X’s repertoire. And in fact a better song than D’Annunzio you couldn’t choose it. D’Annunzio it’s one of those songs that when you listen to them you feel something moving inside you, it’s sympathetic, but after a while it has the power to make you cry. And it is here that the senselessness of our discomfort is revealed, which all the older ones say they know and which they can give a name to while we cannot. And it is here, on this untranslatable feeling, halfway between the tragic and the comic, that Filppo Barbagallo, willy-nilly, shouted to the world of Italian cinema: “I’m here”. And so do we.
