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.
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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.
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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).
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