REGAINED
REGAINED
Amore tossico Toxic Love Claudio Caligari
Italy, 1983 | colour, 35mm, 90 min, Italian Prod: Giorgio Nocella | Prod Comp: Iter International | Sc: Guido Blumir, Claudio Caligari | Cam: Dario Di Palma | Ed: Enzo Meniconi | Music: Detto Mariano | With: Cesare Ferretti, Michela Mioni, Enzo Di Benedetto, Roberto Stani, Loredana Ferrara, Mario Afeltra, Fernando Arcangeli | Print: Cineteca Nazionale | Sales: Surf Film SRL
Non essere cattivo Don’t Be Bad
Claudio Caligari Claudio Caligari had just completed editing Non Essere Cattivo, when he died of cancer in May 2015. He sadly could not witness the film’s premiere at Venice Film Festival, its appointment as Italy’s official entry for the Academy Awards, and its respectable theatrical run. Just like the protagonists of his films, he missed his chance to leave the margins and attain recognition. He left staying the ‘baD’filmmaker of unpolished portrayals of rebel youths who emerged from the troubled decade of political violence of the Seventies, and failed to integrate in the empty dream (or nightmare?) of consumerist achievement dominating Italian collective conscience of the eighties and nineties. Yet, Caligari left a legacy of hope and independence, as his films speak of unconditional love for cinema and of undefeatable determination to stay different. In Non Essere Cattivo, Caligari injected his Pasolinian characters and locations in a paradigm of lowlife buddy movie cum crime à la Scorsese. It is 1995, and childhood friends Cesare and Vittorio are spiraling down a track of irreversible self-destruction. When Vittorio decides to set himself straight, Cesare further sinks into his addiction to drugs and petty crime. But Vittorio decides not to desert Cesare. With sound and fury, and with compassion, Caligari brings his characters to the verge of desperation, but then saves a brim of hope for the very end, in a moving farewell to cinema and life.
Italy, 2015 | colour, DCP, 102 min, Italian Prod: Valerio Mastandrea, Simone Isola, Paolo Bogna, Laura Tosti | Prod Comp: Kimera Film | Sc: Claudio Caligari, Francesca Serafini, Giordano Meacci | Cam: Maurizio Calvesi | Ed: Mauro Bonnani | Prod Des: Giada Calabria | Music: Paolo Vivaldi | With: Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi, Silvia D’Amico, Roberta Mattei, Alessandro Bernardini, Manuel Rulli, Valerio Campitelli | Print/Sales: Rai Com
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45TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM
Toxic Love is one of the seminal masterpieces of Italian cinema of the 1980s. At a time when most Italian directors succumbed to comfortable flirtations with TV drama, Claudio Caligari instead summoned the ghost of Pier Paolo Pasolini and delivered a cinematic manifesto of uncompromising independence and fearless truth. Embracing a rigorous documentary approach and casting a group of real-life junkies and former junkies (who lent their colourful jargon to the dialogues), Caligari painted in Toxic Love a vivid and painful fresco of marginal life that is equally infused with irony and compassion, plus a touch of uncanny romanticism. In a heartfelt tribute from a disciple to his master, Caligari allowed himself to stage his most inescapably dramatic and heartbreaking scene right in front of the monument erected on the site where Pasolini was murdered. An unforgettable debut.
L’odore della notte The Scent of the Night Claudio Caligari
Italy, 1998 | colour, 35mm, 1:1.85, 101 min, Italian Prod: Marco Risi | Prod Comp: Sorpasso Film | Sc: Claudio Caligari, based on the novel ‘Le notte di Arancia meccanica’ by Dido Sacchettoni | Cam: Maurizio Calvesi | Ed: Mauro Bonanni | Prod Des: Maurizio Marchitelli | Sound Des: Tommaso Quattrini | Music: Pivio De Scalzi, Aldo De Scalzi | With: Valerio Mastandrea, Marco Giallini, Giorgio Tirabassi, Alessia Fugardi, Francesca D’Aloja, Little Tony | Print: Cineteca Nazionale | Sales: Minerva Pictures Group S.r.l
Inspired by real events in the Rome of the late 1970s, early 1980s which are chronicled in the evocatively-titled book The Clockwork Orange Gang, Scent of the Night marked Caligari’s comeback with a bang. His belated and much-awaited follow-up to Toxic Love polarized and baffled critics and audiences alike, who seemingly couldn’t cope with his reboot of the poliziottesco (Italo-crime) from the 1970s. A real shame, because Caligari elevates a fast-moving thriller about the violent street-and-home-robbery career of a former policeman and his gang-mates to a poignant socialpolitical metaphor. Featuring an iconic performance by Valerio Mastrandrea and interspersed with cinéphile homages ranging from Melville to Bresson, Scent of the Night is the ultimate Italian cult movie of the 90s. A politically incorrect indictment of a time when the seeds of the vapid hedonism of the Berlusconi age were sown.
45TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM
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