Monday, August 11, 2014

Locarno 2014: Scuola elementare, Alberto Lattuada, 1954

Once again the not-quite-neorealism of Lattuada, a quiet discovery.

Once again his film starts at a train station, although this time not directly at the tracks, but in the shop area of Milano Centrale: before the older, rather sad man, the school caretaker Pilade Mucci, meets his friend at the station, he puts money in some kind of machine (maybe to make a picture?). From the very first shot: A film about consumer culture. The first stroll of Dante Trilli - the friend, a school teacher arriving in the big city for reasons that are never completely disclosed - through the big shopping street is all excitement. And the first time he sees the woman who will make him almost lose his path, she is framed by the display of a jewellery store, as if she herself would be for sale.

Maybe she is for sale in the end, when she leaves teaching for a pursuit of a modelling career? But no, Lattuada is everything but a cynicist, her leaving IS a weakness, but one that is strictly psychological in nature. In the first scene of their story, all fault lies with Trilli, who doesn't recognize her individuality and who will continue to miss something about both her, and his own desire: Only when she leaves him for another life, he starts working at a advertising agency, as if realizing that his pursuit of her was always already motivated by his urge towards consumer capitalism (but jumping to the wrong conclusion).

Where, then, is love? In the past, maybe, or out of reach, outside the window, on the other side of the street, like the nosy (but completely unavailabe) girl his older friend sometimes "talks" to in some kind of minimalistic sign language. (Crammed lower middle class space effortlessly transformed into pictorial elegance: The girl next door framed by two different windows, sometimes also by the kitchen door).

Then, of course, the love story of two men, two friends, two (crippled) idealists, whose mutual bond is much stronger than the trajectory of Trilli's regular love story. His resolute decision to move in with Mucci, Mucci's growing sadness while waiting for him, his gushing joy when he sees Trilli at christmas eve throught the window of a restaurant (maybe this second gaze through a commercialized window someehow frees Trilli from the power of the first one).

Then, of course,Trilli's love for his vocation - not only educating, but, much more important, recogninzing young boys, every single one of them, as individuals: not "children" like some strange species, but so many small men.

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