WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria, July: Cinema, When (2023) by Walter Veltroni - The communist stoup (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Even today, I esteem a misfit who hangs himself more than a living

communist like Veltroni!... heir to a party apparatus that has made the
genealogy of lies its successes... all people who pass themselves off as
benefactors of humanity and in the stench of the powers he then grabbed,
counterfeited, corrupted everything that was possible, to the point of
betraying the historical memory of the Resistance and the hopes of a
profound change in society... guarantors of an illiterate idea of
communism. .. the modern "people's commissars" following the newspaper
with the hyena smile Elly, even in favor of sending arms to Ukraine,
express in large format, a policy of cretinism for the use of monkeys.
Veltroni-thought has always horrified us, not only when he was a
communist in livery but even more when he started playing the left-wing
intellectual good for all seasons of Italian politics... his speeches in
the salons television sets, books or films are a handbook of imbecility
which extols a tolerance of begging and its proselytism towards the
least, the exploited, the oppressed, reveals with every turn of the
phrase, the pitiful bottom of the enthusiasm of a circus clown of outskirts.

The trade in ideas also determines the trade in men. When it is perhaps
the ugliest film ever to appear in the harvest of stupidity of Italian
cinema... the "as we were" that sinks into nostalgia is the pathetic
parish. In 1984, at the funeral of Enrico Berlinguer, the "saint of the
Historic Compromise", a red flag pole (complete with hammer and sickle)
hit Giovanni (Neri Marcorè) on the head and he ended up in a coma...
thirty years later, when he wakes up in a Catholic hospital, under the
protective gaze of the nun who has been taking care of him all the time,
Giulia (Valeria Solarino), he finds a rather changed reality... the
Berlin Wall has collapsed, the The totalitarianism of the Soviet Union
has dissolved into the totalitarianism of a new despot, the euro has
swallowed the lira and his favorite songwriters are gone... in the
hospital he also finds the affection and understanding of Leo (Fabrizio
Ciavoni) , a boy with selective mutism problems... his ex-girlfriend,
Flavia (Olivia Corsini), is married to his friend Tommaso (Gian Marco
Tognazzi)... when they go to see Giovanni in the hospital they tell him
that the father of the daughter is he... End.

The harlequins of the Italian critics (and the nonsense supported by
social networks) wrap Veltroni's film in the armor of good feelings...
someone wrote that Quando is the collective autobiography of a nation,
others the miraculous story of a communist boy which comes back to life
still supported by the old values of the party... we have seen in the
film the desiring body of an ideology of the sacred which educated the
masses to join the communist society with the political dereliction
which eradicated freedom of thought everywhere! The grooms of the PCI
have always been very active and ready to suppress dissidences,
marginalize or denounce subversives. Also in this they are completely
equal to the trained fleas of the PD (the most enlightened sewer of
modern politics).

When Giovanni wakes up from his coma he sings the Internazionale... here
the comic mixes with the ridiculous... Veltroni parades the red flags of
the PCI rallies, the Saiwa biscuits, the table football, the jukebox,
the record player, the end of the PCI, the tablets, the World Cup, the
Unification celebrations of the 70s, the PCI card with the effigy of
Palmiro Togliatti, the front page of L'Unità with the writing in large
letters, Goodbye Enrico. .. there is even the real voice of Red Brigade
member Valerio Morucci who gives directions for the discovery of Aldo
Moro's body... there are many cameos... a busty television presenter
(Elena di Cioccio), an exuberant waiter ( Stefano Fresi), the Magician
Forest (Michele Foresta)... alternate in interludes that gladden the
astonished gaze of the spectators to the point of desperation or boredom.

The awakened Giovanni, in the throes of asphyxiation of intelligence,
rants phrases such as: "It was a community of people who felt they all
had the same values. The same feelings. The ideology was wrong, but the
ideals were not. And the people were honest, fair, beautiful. At
Berlinguer's funeral everyone cried, perhaps because they understood
that then everything would change. That this funeral wasn't just for a
man we all loved. But it was the end of a human adventure that history
had overcome". The lingering tiredness of the film sinks into a universe
of yawns.

The prescriptions of Veltroni's "good communist" remain tied to a party
system that has a lot to do with personal power and very little to do
with the general interest and the public good. Under the banners of the
great canopy of the PCI, the director claims respectability,
consistency, faith in the central committee, but it is not clear how any
regime that prohibits freedom of speech, of expression and controls the
circulation of ideas, can never conceive that the riches of a nation
remain in the hands of a few and misery imposed on the greatest number.
To change things, improve them, reduce injustices, you don't need
electoral parades, but the revolt in the present and planning the
distribution of wealth among a greater number of heads.
When is the very provincial reinterpretation of Woody Allen's Sleepyhead
(1973) and the splendid and irreverent Good bye Lenin! (2003) by
Wolfgang Becker... but here irony arises against intimidation, violence,
subjection... in Veltroni's film there is no sense of filmic
structure... the narration is based on micro- comedy stories and the
interminable, approximate, specious dialogues overflow into caricature:
"Up to now I have protected you from history, but you have become a
little man", says Sister Giulia. "Has the world changed for the better
or for the worse?" asks Giovanni. "Only you can tell us," Sister Giulia
says. "Berlusconi first became president of Milan and then of the
board", "Better if I didn't wake up". "Here was the Rinascita bookshop",
"Now there is a supermarket". "The rebirth of cutlets". For Veltroni the
Party is the matrix of every reality and also the laundry of every
truth. There is no secretion of a fictitious reality... there is the
concealment of the truth, pretending not to know that the education of
consciences to a myth, a prophet or a despot, is the basis of all
disposition.

The subject of When is taken from Veltroni's novel of the same name...
the screenplay written with Simone Lenzi, Doriana Leondeff, assembles
more clichés and indecencies than a Special Tribunal on subversive
activities... the colors of the photography (Davide Manca) are as dull
as the Rai fictions require... the editing (Mirko Platania) does not
reach any emotional construction... the musical background is worthy of
a prime time talk show... it invades the whole film. People sing
everywhere, even in the car. A classic of lack of ideas. The actors look
like the ordered figurines of a collector of stereotypes... Marcorè acts
bewildered without believing it, Solarino is a nun who always laughs...
especially when it's not necessary. Ciavoni slips whenever he appears in
the pathos of the occasion ... Corsini reproposes the cliché of the
girlfriend in a communist sauce and her husband (Tognazzi) dusts off the
meekness of the by-product of a political friendship. Giovanni's sweet
ingenuity thus reaches a state close to idiocy.

Veltroni's camera seems to seek the idea and wanders from room to room,
from setting to setting, from the main characters to the secondary ones
in a sort of mending on insipience... according to Veltroni it is
cinema, the most useless ever seen, which makes the Veltronian imaginary
the stoup of communist amarcord, completely extraneous to the conflicts
of history. It seems to assert that one does not run away from one's own
stigmata... to involuntarily confirm that in every ideology, faith or
doctrine, the misery of social life is but the pale reflection of an
infinite inner misery... the exacerbation of a lack of identity,
spontaneity and love.

When it is the aesthetic-moral crucible of the eternal present of a
tyranny of rigged feelings, unable to free itself from the communist
symbols that deprive the birth of an autonomous, libertarian existence,
proper only to those who possess the consciousness of eternity and kick
fuck pity, consolation and obedience. Libertarian man declares all
ideals useless, beliefs imbecility, art a prolonged lie and
institutional politics a pillory that practices the law of the noose
undisturbed! True confessions are not written with tears (Augustine,
Rousseau, the country curate Meslier or the anarchist Émile Henry
teach), but with an inner fire that turns into fire... and in the glare
of the night, turning into round, each becomes a brother to the other to
meet the dawn of the coming libertarian society.

Pino Bertelli

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca