The last time Italian filmmaker and humorist Franco Maresco was in competition at Venice, with his Cosa Nostra-baiting 2019 mockumentary “The Mafia is No Longer What It Used To Be,” he won the Special Jury Prize. If that title is unfamiliar to you, you haven’t been negligent. Even high-level festival awards can only do so much to raise the profile of films that aren’t built to travel, and Maresco’s unabashedly local brand of satire — steeped in cultural and political reference points with little resonance outside Italy — is as good an example as any. Despite another competition berth on the Lido, his new film “Bravo Bene!” is unlikely to buck that trend.
Inviting considerations of what the equivalent Italian term might be for “inside baseball” — “inside soccer” is too universally scrutable, surely — “Bravo Bene!” doubles or even triples down on the insularity by taking as its subject the director himself. He looks back on his career and pessimistically ahead to his future as an artist, all through the prism of his seemingly failed attempt to make a biopic of the late avant-garde Italian theater doyen Carmelo Bene. Maresco novices need not apply. Ditto any viewers to whom Bene doesn’t rate a nod of recognition, much less an exclamation point. Even with the benefit of English subtitles, large swaths of the humor here feel simply lost in translation: When Maresco makes even his Italian production company Lucky Red the target of a joke, most outside viewers will sense reams of unspoken context eluding their grasp.
Maresco may be searching himself in some sense, though the film is fashioned from the outset as a more literal search. The filmmaker has gone missing, and one of his old friends (Ciccio Mira, returning from “The Mafia Is Not Longer What It Used To Be”) is on the trail in his native Palermo, retracing the director’s steps through hotel rooms (including one he apparently used only to cut his own hair) and industry contacts. The more he hears about Maresco’s recent, erratic behavior, the less he recognizes the pal he’s known for 45 years. It seems the much-troubled, repeatedly delayed shoot of the Bene film has driven him off the deep end, leading producer Andrea Occhipinti to pull the plug and Maresco to accuse him of “filmicide” before going AWOL. (Occhipinti is, of course, in reality the producer of “Bravo Bene!,” and so the meta merry-go-round turns.)
What “footage” we see of the aborted film does not resemble the work of a well man. There are black-and-white scenes from what appears to be a cracked Biblical drama featuring a levitating monk and, to the particular bafflement of the producer, a dancing Pulcinella. There’s a dinner table scene featuring grotesquely made-up actors as Bene and his cohorts, surveyed from above by a pigeon who quite relatably remarks, “What a useless evening.” Glimpses of this alleged project cue a reflection on Maresco’s career to this point, including past collaborations with fellow writer-director Daniele Cipri that riled Italian censors (along with elder industry statesmen like Franco Zeffirelli) for their supposed blasphemy and obscenity: One sketch, for example, features a man sodomizing a donkey.
Nothing in “Bravo Bene!” feels equivalently provocative, though the general antic abrasiveness of Maresco’s comic style is clear even when the punchlines are not: At nearly two hours, it’s a progressively wearying exercise. The film dips into scatological territory with a protracted setpiece involving local film critic Francesco Puma, a locked toilet and oncoming diarrhea. The filmmaker, weary of world and resplendent of beard, eventually does resurface on screen, and production resumes on his film-maudit-within-a-film, though that doesn’t stop him expressing his concern that his medium is dying. “As a young man I knew that beauty wouldn’t save the world,” he says, “but I still thought cinema had a reason to exist.” That seems a tad dramatic, though questioning this particular film’s reason to exist is fair enough.
variety.com
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