Yes in Marshal, the joy of living we found ourselves with a piece subject to the coordinates of the traditional report, the two works that focused the fourth session of this 40th edition of La Mostra de Valencia, would already fall into the category of author's documentary or, at least, with a desire to find a more ambitious or deliberately personal filmic look at what they seek to describe.
In that framework, both the Italian-Spanish production Fried pizza of Domingo de Luís, like the egyptian (with co-production from Denmark and Saudi Arabia) 50 meters de yomna khattab, the same virtues or irregularities can be attributed to them. Both pieces differ, as we will see, on the stages, in the background themes and in its protagonist subjects and objects, but they come together in certain problems of approach that are common to them.. let's go, first, with the arguments.
Fried pizza places us in the Sanitá neighborhood, a popular area of the city of Naples. There we will meet Carlo, a young man who runs a theater group that organizes performances for neighbors in one of the churches in the area. Carlo has an idea: produce a new work in which he wants to combine the experiences and the recipe of the typical dishes of some of the families that live here. Culture and cuisine seem like a good association, especially in a country like Italy. But to do this you will have to carry out a casting to choose their “actors”.
On the other hand, 50 meters places us in the context of a public swimming pool in which Akram, the father of the director of this film, meets regularly with a group of friends to exercise. The meeting between the two will be the necessary excuse to establish a conversation between father and daughter about, fundamentally, to the expectations of life. Of what could have been and perhaps has no longer been, In the case of Akram, and what is still ahead in the case of Yomna.
If we look at the set of both works, The first problem they have is found in the relationship between their initial approaches and their subsequent development.. So, Fried pizza It starts with a couple of very decisive scenes. Sitting in a chair facing the camera, the priest of the church offers us a long dissertation on the value of art in society, and especially in the context of a neighborhood as economically degraded as Sanitá. Immediately after, we will meet Carlo, the director of the future play, whom we accompanied to a meeting with a group of neighbors to whom he also spoke about the importance that theater has had in his life when it came to escaping one of the two possible fates to which it seems that every child of his generation was condemned.: emigrate to another country in search of opportunities or fall into the hands of the camorra.
For your part, Yomna Khattab's film presents us with two scenarios from the start. On one side, The tape begins with images of some domestic recordings made by her father in which we see Yomna, still girl, next to Mostafa, his little brother, in which both are celebrating one of the director's first birthdays. After this sequence, The film shows us a film crew that is recording Yomna's father, now with 70 years, celebrating his own anniversary with a group of friends from his pool club. Maybe both scenes have some relationship..
The problem is that these premises, so strongly marked at the beginning of each work, They lose strength as the footage progresses until, depending on what case, almost disappear from the center of the narrative. So, although we follow Carlo from time to time in the search for the actors who are going to take part in his play, These scenes move away from the core of a supposed story that little by little becomes a kind of anthropological walk through the Sanitá neighborhood..
Something very similar happens in the case of the Yomna film.. Once the context and what its main characters seem like, The film will take a narrative turn to pivot almost exclusively on the figure of the director herself and a series of existential problems that seem to affect her deeply.. As Yomna herself comments on camera, at the moment of starting the filming of the film, He is at a very certain point in his life.. After working for years as an advisor to a government minister, Yomna has left her position to pursue her dream of becoming a film director.. From there she will start a debate with herself about this decision and what possible consequences it will have for her future..
This double circumstance does not mean that both films do not address issues that could be interesting to the viewer.. In the case of Fried pizza We could talk about the importance of cuisine as the backbone of popular culture. around food, Other issues or themes will appear, such as the presence of religion in Milanese society., the value of music or the importance of cooperation in a community that does not exactly swim in abundance. A space of dilapidated buildings, poorly paved streets and where the rust of economic scarcity is portrayed on each wall or interior of each house that Domingo de Luís's camera captures.
And the same thing happens in the case of Yomna Khattab's film. Through conversations with her father or with herself (always addressing the viewer), the director wonders about the passage of time, about the value of motherhood, of the need or not to build a family, about creating expectations in life or loneliness in old age.
The problem in both cases is that none of these secondary issues quite form the central node of a story that leads the viewer towards measurable consequences., leaving all of this in mere brushstrokes dropped as filler for plot premises that very soon collide with the scarce possibilities of a more solid development.. So, in Fried pizza All these topics do not go beyond becoming mere images, postcards of a deeper tourist than psychological or sociological tour of the famous Neapolitan neighborhood. When the tape ends, we can understand the effort that Carlo makes to organize his work, but, as spectators, we fail to appreciate the relationship of art in the articulation of the neighborhood, just as the priest of the church says at the beginning of the tape, beyond a series of more or less ornamental curiosities. The same thing happens in the case of Yomna Khattab's film. We can understand your doubts, but these remain disconnected from what seems to be the object of his film analysis.
There are three reasons why I think both productions stumble when it comes to creating a story that interests or involves the viewer.. The first of them would be found precisely there, in the lack of vision of both directors when it comes to perceiving the limited scope of their premises. For some reason, It seems evident that the clue of the play runs out very quickly as a guide to the story in the case of Domingo de Luís.. And the same thing happens to Yomna Khattab, more interested in herself than in the group of elderly people that she seems to want to portray and whose reality must have seemed little suggestive or lacking sufficient nuances or particularities to complete the entire footage.. It should not be a coincidence that neither of the two films reaches the length of a standard production, With just 65 minutes in the case of Fried pizza y 75 for 50 meters.
Very linked to the above, There are two views that are clearly foreign to the realities they aspire to portray.. This external view conditions both the form and the development of two films that remain outside of said worlds., as mere spectators or tourists, without ever penetrating your epidermis, the Sanitá neighborhood in the first case, and the elderly, in the second.
In both proposals (and this would be the third reason) the directors have considered that this initial premise was attractive enough to sustain the development of the narrative. Subjugated by the unquestionable visual appeal of their subject of analysis, they forgot to tell us a story, deriving their proposals towards secondary paths that, although they may be visually suggestive, they fail to articulate something that involves us. So, Domingo de Luís trusts the strength of his proposal to the charisma of the characters he will meet along the way and there we will meet Pasquale, the friendly owner of a delicatessen, o al vivaracho Ivan, the boy who will finally star in Carlo's play (work that we are not going to see, by the way, another lack of the film). But, as we say, the sympathy that these characters awaken for themselves, The curious thing about some details of their lives does not make a story, but a sum of fixed portraits, no movement.
And the same goes for the concerns that seem to distress Yomna, barely sketched questions, formulated by the director herself out loud, but whose consequences do not have any development throughout the film, an address, remaining mere questions that seem to interest us because the director herself considers it so., without entering into at any time to assess the contradictions that she herself incurs in those conversations she has with her father. Facing anguish at the possibility of motherhood, Yomna finds herself before the unconditional understanding of her father, that neither questions nor disapproves their decisions, on the contrary, showing a healthy and intelligent understanding, canceling a conflict that is left in your own hands. At one point in the film it will be Yomna herself who considers her relationship with the film she is making., to which it will conclude: “This movie is about the question of how I feel.”. Another thing is what “how it feels” should be up to the viewers.. As if confirming this idea or perhaps to prevent any possible subsequent criticism., Yomna Khattab questions the fact that, after as much work as he claims to have done, finally have a movie, that is to say, have a story. How he confesses to his father, maybe to cover the rear, Khattab considers his proposal, not as a solution to your questions, but like a journey. What he doesn't quite specify is where he wants to take us or where he wants us to pay attention., beyond an “I” that covers everything. A rambling “I” and for whom the making of this film may have served as therapy., but it's not our concern.
Both movies make the same mistake.: assume that what interests the authors must interest the viewer. On one side, the attractiveness of a degraded neighborhood, but from which the marrow is not removed nor does it serve as a platform to raise any nodal issue. Of other, some questions that are supposedly relevant because the author also assumes that they are of interest in themselves, perhaps in a certain political context., but that reality returns to her crumbled in spite of herself. A very unsuggestive exercise in aesthetic and political narcissism. GERARDO LEON
