ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL: Is it possible to make Venice, one of the world’s most beautiful, romantic and historic cities, and its denizens look dull and uninteresting?
Highly unlikely, I thought, until watching Italian director Carlo Mazzacurati’s documentary Sei Venezia (Six Venice).
Mazzacurati sets out to encapsulate the complexities, joys, challenges and rhythms of daily life in the region by profiling six of its citizens. Not a bad concept but the outcome is sporadic, at best, because four of the six subjects tell mundane stories, one is a genuinely colourful character and the other is intermittently fascinating but long winded.
It’s a wasted opportunity for a filmmaker noted for his narrative flair in movies such as The Passion, An Italian Romance and Holy Tongue.
The doco’s less than enticing first interviewee is Giovanni Galeazzi, a retiree who works as a volunteer in the Venice archive. The job clearly gives him a purpose after his wife died and he’d raised their two daughters but he laments the 'loss of the city, choked by traffic and by frenzy".
Next up is Roberta Zanchin, a chambermaid for an opulently grand hotel. Among her few anecdotes concerning star guests are an encounter with Brad Pitt – curiously, she says he looked at her as if to ask, 'Oh God, what does she want?" – and observing that Jerry Lewis was tidy and had a scent which she didn’t recognise. Wow.
One of her favourite movies, illustrated by an amusing clip, is Venezia, la luna e tu (Venice, the Moon and You), a comedy starring Alberto Sordi as a gondolier. An attractive blonde aged in her 30s, she lives with her parents but refers to a boyfriend. Roberta says her father, a gondolier, appeared in a movie in which he pushed Marcello Mastroianni into a canal, also illustrated.
Her brother died a few years earlier, aged 24. On that she remarks, 'I feel alright (sic) so I have less trouble accepting it than others." What caused his demise and why is she so accepting?
The director doesn’t press her, instead moving on to Ernesto Canal, trumpeted in a slide as 'the man who changed history". An amateur archaeologist, Ernesto discovered artefacts and ruins in the lagoon dating back to the Bronze Age and which suggested the city was founded by the Romans in the 1st century.
An interesting man, but Mazzacurati lets him ramble when tighter editing would have conveyed his story more effectively. Ernesto drily notes that rather than encouraging his digs, the Bureau of Fine Arts 'didn’t want me to find things because they had to intervene, deciding whether to have the work done on the shores, the canal excavations and so on".
The film then segues to Carlo Memo, a ponderously self-important painter who prattles on about the difference between figurative and abstract art. He specialises in the latter, pointing to a painting of colourful squiggles which, he says helpfully, represent waves.
'My paintings are like branches where you don’t understand a thing, things that loonies do," he says. In a rare moment of emotion, Memo, who lives on the island of Burano, complains that 'everyone is against me; they say I brought ugly things, meaning my paintings". He accuses 80 per cent of his detractors of not being able to read or write, prompting a man nearby to interject, 'Don’t tell lies".
A bit more of that might have spiced this otherwise restrained, low key film.
The stand-out character is Ramiro Ambrosi, a career criminal who began stealing money, jewellery and furs when he was 15. After some years in and out of gaol – the doco leaves out such salient details – he went straight, got married and had children.
But the past two years have been rough as his wife died and he couldn’t find work as a chef, alleging that restaurants only want to hire non-Europeans. Is that accurate? A true documentarian might have delved into that issue but Mazzacurati ignores it.
Last up is Massimo Comin, an articulate, self-confident boy whose parents own a restaurant. In most respects Massimo appears no different to kids of his age anywhere, a Bruce Lee fan who has a crush on a classmate.
But there’s a touch of pathos when the boy admits there are times when he wishes he’d never been born, referring to the disability of being born with crooked feet.
Out of all this, where is the heart and soul of Venice? Poorly defined, if at all, I’d suggest. The camerawork is classy but interspersed with numerous picture-postcard shots of canals, crumbling buildings, water craft and people partying and swimming.
