Notizie degli scavi, published in 1964, is the last of three early short stories by Franco Lucentini, a rarity outside the close association with Carlo Fruttero. A tale narrated by the voice of the protagonist, in pages capable of inventing a language that is a complex and structured mental landscape, capable of mirroring a humanity, of describing a man and inscribing him within a world, of saying without explicating, in a dialectic between realist instances and personal filters and deformations. In adapting the text, with a philological fidelity that is never blind, Emidio Greco – the author of a cinema that is both cultured and nobly, finely popular – adapts the first person of the script to the objectivity of the third person film, transforming the emanation of a thought into a new reality. A reality in which the language of the story’s protagonist becomes the language of the entire surrounding, the world’s actions filtered through his gaze the logic of all behaviour and Rome a global mental projection. A question of style. Subjectivity takes on a purely cinematic form, in dislocating descriptive digressions, moments of pure contemplation that punctuate and alienate human comedy. The rare and unquestionable merit of Notizie degli scavi is that of proposing a vision that speaks of the world (of misery, of labour and existential precariousness) without sociologic-pornographic simplifications, far from any realist pretence, but not detached from reality. A post-Pasolinian miniature in an atypical form tending towards comedy, it is the fruit of a cinema centred (modernly) on the questioning of the status of identity (arbitrary identification is the real news of the “scavi”), but, at the same time, free of relativism, given the becoming of the protagonists enclosed in a well-defined structural grid (social prison). Painfully poetic, imbued with bitter optimism, it is a film that is political in its own way, shot with tender rigour, skilful in transfiguring reality into a lunar and absolutely coherent representation, acted by actors capable of giving substance to a language (verbal, physical, sentimental) that is decidedly different from both minimalism and the prevailing bad comedy. In cramming it into a label, one surrenders to: a gem.
Giulio Sangiorgio
Genre: drama
Cast
Giuseppe Battiston: Il professore
Ambra Angiolini: The Marquise
Iaia Forte: The Lady
Giorgia Salari: Lea
Anna Paola Vellaccio: Gina
Francesca Fava: Wanda
Soundtrack Luis Bacalov
