Pietro Marcello: La Bocca del lupo

In his Danish language texts from this year’s Cinema du Réel, my co-blogger Allan Berg reveals avec plaisir that his prejudice about the festival being for the pure observational documentary maybe is wrong. It is indeed, both because the development of the creative documentary in general draws away from the observation including much more fictional or personal reflective essayistic elements in the narrative, and because the festival selection this year (this is my gut feeling as I did not get to watch it all) appears more daring than usual when it comes to breaking the classical dramaturgy.

Which is the case for one more (the other being ”la paura”, see below) Italian film that confused and surprised me with its ability to create an intense, mostly visually dominated atmosphere by presenting an abrupt, disharmonic structure that points in many directions. The place is Genova, never seen as beautiful as here with these brownish harbour images; archive with scratches as has the character of the film, Enzo, a former gangster, now a person in a film that lets him sort-of-play himself, going around in film-noir sequences, in old worn down factory buildings, in small streets full of prostitutes and transvestites, accompanied by local songs. It is all very textual, scratches, old film material being used in a new way, a reconstruction of a past, but there are also wonderful observational improvisations like one in a bar where a client and a barman perform a dance – and then suddenly there is a long interview with the companion of Enzo through 2o years, a transsexual, a beautiful love monologue it is. What a fine mess of a film! Title translated: The Mouth of the Wolf.

The film runs at Cinema du Réel the 26th and 27th of March.

Italy, 2009, 68 mins.

www.cinereel.org

http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/forum/program/

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