No reason to complain that we're living in a cultural desert. This month sees a surfeit of film festivals in the city, with the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival opening today (see page 1), the Silent Film Festival kicking off next Wednesday (see above), and the Italian Film Festival Bangkok, which is currently taking place at CineArt, EmQuartier, until Thursday.
The line-up is impressive, with the heavyweights landing this weekend. Three films by three of Italy's most exciting contemporary filmmakers will be showing: Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders (Sunday, 3.30pm, and Tuesday, 8pm), Matteo Garrone's Reality (tomorrow, 9pm, and Wednesday, 8pm) and the winner of the 2014 Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film, Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (tomorrow, 6pm, and Thursday, 8pm). Together they combine to present a multi-layered representation of present-day Italy.
The Wonders indeed has moments of small wonder, with an unassuming, rarefied beauty of life living on the edge. Set in a small farm in central Italy, Rohrwacher's film is about a bee-keeping family with three daughters and constant financial worries. The eldest of the girls, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), is a resourceful pre-teen who works hard to help her irascible father in the farm and her mother to take care of the children. The film has a loose structure, its raw, documentary-style realism sometimes interrupted by dreamlike episodes (during which Monica Belucci appears), and yet it grows into a touching portrait of pastoral existence and an honest coming-of-age tale.
The mellow tone of The Wonders is contrasted by the edgy (though eventually sentimental) misadventure of Luciano, the fishmonger in Reality. The film has an extraordinary opening sequence, a fluid travelling shot of an extravagant party attended by bizarre guests who actually are real humans; perhaps not unexpectedly, the film called Reality is a discourse on that concept, and the central narrative here concerns Luciano's increasingly delusional quest to become a reality TV star. Our tragic hero, an everyman who works in the market of Naples, is played by Aniello Arena (a real-life convict serving a life sentence) and it's his mix of candour and curiosity that gives this meandering film its soul. Garrone, the director, made a better film in the nail-biting mafia saga Gomorrah; his shot at pondering contemporary Italy here is admirable but somewhat weak.
The name of Federico Fellini hangs like a indelible forefather above Reality — and even more intensely in another highlight showing tomorrow. Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty is a picaresque tableau of Italy and its attempt to cling on to twilight glamour. A very attractive film with exquisite visuals and set pieces, the film centres on Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a writer who hops from one party to another, from exhilarating nightclubs to high-society soirées, while lamenting the fading aura of his great city. Before and after its victory at the Oscars last year, the film has had its ardent admirers (and some detractors), but certainly, this is something deserved to be seen on the big screen.
Italian Film Festival Bangkok 2015 runs until Thursday at Quartier CineArt. Tickets cost 150, 170 and 300 baht. All films are in Italian with English subtitles.
