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Reality
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| Year: |
2012
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Director: |
Matteo Garrone
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| Stars: |
Aniello Arena, Loredana Simioli, Nando Paone, Nello Iorio, Nunzia Schiano, Rosario D'Ursa, Giuseppina Cervizzi, Claudia Gerini, Raffaele Ferrante, Paola Minaccioni, Ciro Petrone, Salvatore Misticone, Vincenzo Riccio, Martina Grazuiso
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| Genre: |
Comedy, Drama |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Fishmonger Luciano (Aniello Arena) is the life and soul of the party, and encouraged by his family and friends he acts the goat at every social occasion - they're always telling him he should be on television. Take the last wedding he attended, where there was a guest of honour booked in the shape of Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante) from reality television show Big Brother, and he said all the right things in blessing the wedding with his celebrity presence. But as he was going to leave, Luciano appeared dressed as a woman and pretending to be his ex-girlfriend; the star grinned and bore it, but Luciano thinks he deserves more...
Reality TV is such a fact of life now that it would be refreshing to see a film depicting it as a positive thing rather than the scourge of modern media and the most blatant example of how society was dumbing down, but you were not going to see that in Matteo Garrone's movie take on the phenomenon. He had more background in the format that many other commentators, having worked behind the scenes on Big Brother in Italy, but he had also seen the detrimental effect the allure of fifteen minutes of fame would have as his girlfriend's brother (who contributed to the script) became obsessed with the show to the extent his mental health suffered.
Whether Garrone felt guilty about being complicit in this - he was one who encouraged the man - or not, if his attitude to the phenomenon wasn't exactly benevolent, it was at least intriguing. He claimed he wanted to tell his story not from the point of view of the winners in the business, but from the "victims", and he saw the viewers in that way as much as he saw the participants, in a "we are all to blame" view on the affair. Without any apparent irony, the director took as his star a member of the public who he saw great potential in: actually Arena was someone he wanted to work with on his previous film Gomorrah, but legal difficulties had been an obstacle.
Seeing as how Arena was in prison serving twenty years; Garrone had cast actual criminals for his last movie, but this man was given permission to film by day if he returned to the jail at night, which he did, because the magistrate thought it would rehabilitate him back into society. You might not think someone who had been behind bars for so long would be appropriate as a gregarious type, but Arena handled it very well, largely thanks to Garrone underlining the prison imagery as garrulous Luciano is increasingly trapped by an ambition which is not doing him any good. From the confines of the modern take on celebrity he gradually loses his mind, leading up to a final shot which is both creepy and provocative.
There was some discussion about what that final shot meant, yet how real the events of the ending are was very much in keeping with the mood, which is light and fluffy on the surface until a disturbing shadow of madness looms over the proceedings. Luciano, with his family and friends backing him all the way because they too think appearing on television is the pinnacle of life, applies for Big Brother and doesn't get that far with it, in spite of those around him believing he's a natural. This breakdown in his self image and how people with power actually perceive him is very pertinent to the reality show experience, as there's little the viewers like better than a contestant being brought down to earth, yet for Luciano this all happens without any cameras on him. Nevertheless, he begins thinking he still has a chance to appear on the current season, and that the producers are observing him, and that path lies to an actual, mental breakdown. If a shade too loosely assembled, it had interesting things to say about media-saturated existence. Eerie-cheery music by Alexandre Desplat.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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