4) Cagliari – Lizzani

The journey through 12 REGISTI PER 12 CITTA’ continues with the least impressive entry to date — to me, anyway. A shame, because I’ve liked some of Carlo Lizzani’s work, including his Cannes ’68 entry, BANDITI A MILANO. And the ’88 compendium/travelogue continues to be a role call of the dead: Lizzani suicided off a balcony at age 91, which is tragic but also vaguely impressive, even if it shouldn’t be.

Lizzani was a critic as well as a filmmaker and his last works are mostly documentaries about cinema — Rossellini, Visconti, Zavattini are subjects. So it makes sense that his segment is more like a straight documentary. But quite a boring one. The voice-over gives us a lot of dry facts, and the shots are rather conventional helicopter angles, static views of buildings, and some moderately interesting handheld roving around. We learn quite a lot about the history of Cagliari, but if you’re like me you won’t retain any of it.

The music is a disaster, I think. It’s credited to “the Grop’s Power” (?) and Luigi Lai (any relation to Francis Lai?) but the way it’s cut and the way it sounds makes it seem like library music, laid in by the yard.

Suddenly, at 4.50, things get interesting. Helicopter shots take us to the bronze age fortified villages of the nuraghi, which the camera starts exploring, handheld, in suspenseful, winding Steadicam movements through stone labyrinths, and then Lizzani throws in quick cuts to artifacts recovered from the site and now exhibited in a museum. The short sharp detail shots penetrate the film like knife blows, the brick-red background colour adding to their impact, and in addition the objects are all rotating to give them dimensionality. It’s a really lovely sequence: and the objects themselves are so stylised they same quite alien. It’s an encounter with the past that carries just the right quality of startlement: like diving into the water and meeting a sea monster, face to face. Even the music works here: even the fact that it feels chopped up.

I really dislike the voice-over man, so things take a dip when he comes back. I deduct several more points when this becomes the first entry in the series to mention the football, which is the films’ ostensible reason for existing but which Antonioni and co. quite rightly declined to have anything to do with. But Lizzani has shown, with that one great bit, that he’s still a true filmmaker, and my enthusiasm for the piece as a whole has risen. As the sun sinks slowly in the west and we say a fond farewell to Cagliari, I tip my hat to another dead director.

The ’68 Comeback Special: Banditi A Milano

Continuing our trawl (Scout Tafoya & I)  through the unscreened films in competition from the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, a project I share with Scout Tafoya of Apocalypse Now.

BANDITI A MILANO is an obscure polizzi directed by Carlo Lizzani, and it’s (to me, anyway) one of the more surprising selections in the ’68 line-up. Lizzani has some impressive credits (his 1967 spaghetti western REQUIESCANT, aka KILL AND PRAY, featuring PP Pasolini, is highly regarded), but is mainly a genre specialist, and the crime genre is usually not particularly respected at Cannes unless in the hands of the Americans. Lizzani is also one of the few directors from that line-up to be still alive AND working.

The movie begins as a mockumentary, and a not entirely convincing one. Tomas Milian as a youthful police commissioner with a long cigarette holder seems unable to pause convincingly to suggest extemporaneous speech. Then we meet a retired hood who can do that kind of thing brilliantly, and it becomes clear that stylistic consistency isn’t going to be the film’s strength… but then things get interesting…

With a sometimes-handheld look, Lizzani blunders about from anecdote to anecdote, seemingly attempting a kind of MONDO CANE portrait of criminal life in one Italian city. The glimpses into protection rackets etc don’t seem to offer any insights you couldn’t get from THE PUBLIC ENEMY, but the fast movement of the narrative is a compensation. There’s a bit about an aspiring female singer who gets abducted and set on fire, all set to swooning romantic music (by Riz Ortolani), thereby echoing the weird eros-thanatos admixture of the giallo genre. And then Gian Maria Volonte shows up as a bank robber and we settle into a longer story, and things get really quite interesting — (1) because this sweaty, lipless motormouth is a magnetically repulsive presence, tirelessly ranting, each phoneme jabbing like a stubby finger (2) because long stories have more room to engross than short ones and (c) because the very notion of beginning a film with a series of sketches and then lunging with no warning into a more developed storyline is a weird and interesting structural approach. So we award points for originality at least.

Then there’s an action climax at the one hour mark where VO introduces us to a cluster of civilians going about their separate business, all on a fatal collision course with the latest bank robbery — the novelistic device of sharing future knowledge with the audience is one too rarely used. The movie’s cynicism climaxes in a “happy” ending where justice is seen to be done but nobody in the audience is likely to be satisfied.

Volonte’s media-savvy crook isn’t quite as interesting as his paranoid cop in INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION, but it’s a close thing. Likening his gang to the Beatles and Milan to “America in the thirties” — cue cars screeching through streets blasting at each other with tommy guns — he’s the kind of magnetic psychopath who spews out provocative statements he may not even believe, but which do occasionally contain food for thought. Lizzani’s movie is at least good enough to deserve a proper subtitled DVD — it’s the best polizzi I’ve seen, thought admittedly I haven’t enjoyed many examples of that thick-eared genre. Any other Italian cop-show recommendations?

Check out Scout’s previous entry here.