Federico Cianferoni | Romana Gioventù! (Roman Youth!) / 2022

malaise among the joys of roman culture

by Douglas Messerli

 

Federico Cianferoni (screenwriter and director) Romana Gioventù! (Roman Youth!) / 2022

 

O the angst of Roman youth, particularly Luke (Michele Favaro) who is convinced that a young Haitian girl—who perceives him as a young man living in Rome as being extraordinarily wealthy, given not only the Western financial stability of the center of Italian culture, but the available history, food, and other general pleasures—is mistaken, he is not at all financially stable, but part of an Italian underground of creative resources that have no opportunity of expressing their full talents. Sitting on the bathroom stool, he is determined that not only what he is trying to produce is shit, but that he can no longer create anything of worth, and if fact cannot even any longer shit nor produce his shitty art.

   His friend (Alan Cappelli Goetz), while they dine on coffee and endless sweets, tries to make him realize not only how lucky he is but how any movie he might make only helps create garbage in a world already swimming in it. Better do something politically valuable, he argues, suggesting he stop eating tuna and other trawled fish. But Luke likes fish (who wouldn’t in Italy?), the artichokes he daily buys in the market, the beans, strawberries, pizza, carbonara, Carciofo alla giudia (a specialty of the Trastevere, the old Jewish district of Rome, where the artichokes are deep fried first at a low temperature to soften them, and then fried at a higher temperature to color and crispen the flower-like leaves. I’ve eaten this memorable dish in the old Jewish district of the Trastevere and I highly recommend it.) What’s a Roman youth to when there are so very many daily temptations. Even being caught in traffic in Rome reveals it’s endless beauty, so proclaims our would-be artist.

     Poor boys, what they have to suffer, watching a professional film crew make another film right outside Luke’s apartment window! Luke seeks psychological analysis for his problems of feeling neglected in the overabundant society in which he lives, without ever being able to comprehend what that poor Haitian girl might have truly been envying.

     The movie goes on like this until the boys, dressed in their tighty whites do a long dance of desire and love, surely as a prelude to delicious sex.

      O those poor Italian beauties! What they have to suffer is nearly unendurable!

     This lovely satire might also almost serve as an invitation to enjoy all the pleasures of Italian culture, while also winking at the movies of Antonioni, Rossellini, Pasolini, Visconti, Bolognini, Fellini, Bertolucci, and others. Yes, in Italy, it is hard for a young man to live up to the greatness of his own culture’s history, particularly when he becomes far too aware of it, and luxuriates in its pleasures. The past, as director Federico Cianferoni makes clear, is too much with him in Roman culture, and it is truly hard to escape into a world of what the new might represent.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).