Quilty-6

A brilliant debut by Antonio Rezza and Flavia Mastrella, a duo already famous for numerous shorts which have won them prizes all over Italy and for the theatrical show "Pitecus". ESCORIANDOLI is a completely out-of-the-ordinary film, marked by sharp, provoking humor which stirs and disturbs the viewers rather than just making them laugh. We are light years away from the mild, reassuring humor of the new Italian comics (Pieraccioni, Albanese, Aldo Giovanni & Giacomo), Rezza's style upsets, deranges, bewilders and wounds. A "pain humor", by no means conciliating, completely concentrated on acute linguistic games and mainly on Rezza's extreme "body talk", as he is a chameleon gifted with an extraordinary facial mimicry. But it would be reductive to state only the acting body of Rezza: ESCORIANDOLI is in fact an impressive film visually and direction-wise, created with an absolutely unmistakable style: crooked and out-of-place shots, with the characters always moving at the margins, concise editing which often ignores correct grammar, cold, crystalline photography, delirious and futuristic settings, a strange psychedelic soundtrack (by CSI). There is only one defect to find in these two filmmakers: not having a sense of rhythm and synthesis. In fact, after the initial surprise, the viewer ends up getting used to the "newness" of Rezza's humor and watches the rest of the movie in boredom and indifference (partly due to the excessive prolixity of certain episodes, such as the second and fouth, which are the weakest ones). But the devastating originality of this debut work immediately makes it evident why it was neglected by the ignorant Italian masses.

The best italian film of the 90's, the most extreme and radical work since SALO', a ruthless representation, in a surreal-metaphorical key, of a civilization condemned to worshipping its own blindness. The two sicilian directors use a language free from compromise and from the traditional storyline rules: the movie is photographed in a sharp and very contrasting black & white, with no beautiful pimp music, and lacks a logical story. There are no women (the ones we see are actually men), and the language is strict sicilian dialect. The directing style is characterized by long fixed shots on a post-atomic world, which is really present-day Palermo, inhabited by fat people in socks and underwear who burp and fart while roaming around smelly alleyways and waste dumps. And above all, there is the black humor of the two "cinics", acute, ruthless, and very intelligent. An extraordinary essay of surrealistic cinema in perennial confinement between drama and irony, between disconcertment and a liberatory laugh, the whole mixed with a profound sense of squalor and discomfort that accompanies the viewer even after the film is over. A film that shows the loss of certainty and moral values in today's world, the absence of order and sense: God is dead and man is alone in this abyss, this is what Cipri and Maresco seem to be reminding us of with a resonant blow.