WTI Magazine #14    2014 Jan, 24
Author : Simone doc Bracci      Translation by:

There was a time when Italian cinema, our cinema, used to win hands-down a lot of international success. That media hype has been turned off for thirty years now, except for some small flame of honor that occasionally shakes the Olympus of the great, as happened with Roberto Benigni 15 years ago, and now happens with Paolo Sorrentino.

In the middle there's been nothing, except for an author who, starting from his talent, has been able to tell an awkward and bad vision of Italy, a sort of a secular great beauty, more authorial and less glossy, more cynical and less fascinating. We're talking about Matteo Garrone, who after the success of Reality, a brilliant social satire with the prisoner-actor Aniello Arena, now gets back in the game with an international project.

The movie we're talking about is "Tale of Tales", some sort of "global" story that will describe in a modern way some of the most famous Italian fairy tales, taking advantage of the spread of a trend that has invaded the television and then the movie business. Garrone himself, so jealous of his Roman traditions and so ambitious to aim for the heart of Hollywood, has repeatedly admitted that he unveils on the set his double soul, and this time to do that he will do it with international actors.

In fact, in the cast chosen for the film we find Salma Hayek, Mexican actress "adopted" by the United States, and a French actor with an Italian soul like Vincent Cassel, recently divorced from Monica Bellucci. The shooting will begin next spring in Italy and the production wants to shoot for the whole 2014 to be able to present the movie at the next Cannes Film Festival.

We can imagine how, or rather in part we hope to, to give new prestige to our cinema, try to win again as he did in 2008 for the presentation of "Gomorra" and to be considered again a big success of the Italian cinema business: which, on the other side, would be partly wrong, because we only have one Sorrentino and one Garrone, and behind them we see a scary generation gap. But that's another interesting story to develop ...