Notte italiana

The lawyer Otello Morsiani, advised by his childhood friend Checco, accepts the work offered by the Paduan councillor Melandri – to estimate a landed property in the area of the Po delta, destined to be dispossessed in order to build a natural park. Where once they extracted methane, now the soil risks to sink because of hydro-geological impoverishment, and Morsiani soon finds out that a mystery is hidden there – a murder committed twenty years before. Driven by his stubborn honesty and by the love for a girl on the run from her past of terrorist violence, the lawyer lays his life on the line, even sacrificing his friendships, in order to discover the truth.

The debut film by Carlo Mazzacurati, presented at the 4. Venice International Film Critics’ Week, after more than twenty years, displays all its modernity and testifies the extraordinary ability of his director to become, during his coherent career, interpreter and narrator of the Italian territory and society in their process of traumatic transformations. The best Marco Messeri ever, playing the role of a sort of Philip Marlowe of Polesine, harmonizes all around him a bunch of actors – from Remo Remotti playing the ambiguous gas station clerk-mechanic, to Mario Adorf, the entrepreneur Tornova (“the best of the chickens and the eggs”), to the cameo of Memè Perlini, to the young yet already famous Giulia Boschi playing Daria, the fascinating girl loved by Otello, symbolic and sorrowful phantom of a political past rooted in the director’s autobiography. Drawing passionately on the nineteenth-century novel and the classic cinema, with explicit quotations from Antonioni and Visconti, but also from the “eastern” tradition à la John Ford, where the Italian north-east landscape replaces the grasslands, sort of empty non-place, grey and rainy, portrayed with unusual pictorial taste, Notte italiana is a film that still surprises us nowadays for its perfect mix of comedy and noir, but especially for its ruthless moral analysis of the endemic harms of an Italy not yet distraught by the “Mani Pulite” tsunami.

First film produced by the new-born Sacher Film founded by Nanni Moretti and Angelo Barbagallo, the film will be screened within the celebration for the 25th edition of the Venice International Film Critics’ Week in a new 35mm format. –Venice International Film Critics’ Week