Fri
19-Oct-2007

one hundred nails

After Valzer, we saw another Italian film, this time a subtle humorous anti-Christian tale of a young theology professor who looks exactly like Jesus, and the film doesn't try to hide that everyone thinks he looks like Jesus too. It's hard to take away any one message or point the film might have been trying to make, but it seems that the professor decides his life spent poring over religious books is meaningless and in one magnificent act of vandalism he drives nails through a hundred priceless books in the lofty library that he and his colleagues share. The rest of the film is about him as he flees to stay with a small squatter community by a village on the banks of the River Po, who fall in love with him as the police close gradually in.

The film is actually quite funny and light, but shot through with amazing moments of lyrical beauty, where the professor will rise to the occasion and bring forth some biblical or anti-biblical truth about life and authentic experience. There's a great line where he asks the sergeant questioning him: "how many books have you read? ten? in your whole life? when you look back through your life what do you see? when I look back, all I see is books"

At that moment I think all of us in audience who have read far too many books suddenly had a pang of abject existential fear!

valzer

Alex and I met up with Charles and his friend Fabio at BFI Southbank last night to see Valzer, a cool Italian film shot in one take over the course of a day in a hotel.

The central characters are the hotel staff, particularly a maid having an interesting and emotional confrontation with the father of one of her ex-colleagues. The father has been in prison for years and has been exchanging letters with the maid thinking that she was his daughter. The hotel staff are all doing their best to live meaningful lives on low wages, surrounded by a range of extremely rich corrupt guests, from big Italian busty models to football magnates discussing how to rig their games to a sociological expert who lectures the football magnates on how best to manipulate the common people through sport and TV so that their lives become so cold and empty that they will do whatever they are told.

The film is really good at painting a comic but depressing world of bleak corruption that the drama of the humble central characters is played out against. The decision to shoot it all in one take makes for a particularly engrossing feeling of being sucked into one tight evolving story.