Happy Family

Happy Family by Gabriele Salvatores is a movie that combines different forms of art: from literature -Pirandello's echoes are thick in the texture of the plot- to music -the black & white sequence on the notes of Chopin's Nocturne n.20 is of memorable beauty: Milan by night, the speed of the underground, the street workers, the skyscrapers' profile and the Dome.

Art and life mingle. Ezio tries to keep the two separated as he shouts to his nagging characters: "This is a film, not life!". But Vincenzo immediately counters: "There is no difference."

Everything is intertwined in this movie that ends and finishes with the opening and closing of a theatre curtain. The frame is in fact Pirandello's Six characters in Search of an Author, only in Salvatores's case the characters are eight and the author is a screenwriter, 38-year-old Ezio, who decides to make something about his life and starts writing an art film.

And that's how the story begins: the characters present themselves and the relationship that link them. Altogether they form a happy family. But happy family is also the clique that the writer creates around himself. Everything is a farce, everything is a caricature. Even the chance encounter between Anna and Ezio, the turning point of the whole story, becomes a surreal vignette underlined by a heavy presence of the colour yellow (yellow flowers, yellow car, yellow houses).

Every single frame seems the result of a careful composition, as if every single frame was a painting. This is especially true in the sequence where Ezio and Caterina make love - the reference is to Renaissance painting. The poetry of it all is moving.

It is reassuring that 50 years after Fellini celebrated the glamour of Italian way of doing it in La Dolce Vita there are still film-makers capable of conveying the charm of our culture, the beauty of our country, the sense of aesthetics that permeates our daily life. However, once again, it seems that Italian cinema cannot express beauty outside the bourgeois circle, that of normal people, less rich, less glamorous, less Milanese.

And still the movie lightly touches upon several themes such as family, love, art, illness, death, the sense of life. Some scenes, though, have a life of their own and are there just for entertainment's sake, such as the sequence set at the dodgy massage studio of a Chinese girl or the question that the protagonist keeps asking himself: "What the fuck is a seagull doing in a city with no sea?"

The film is dedicated to the people who are scared: scared to fall in love, scared to die, scared to smell, scared to have smeared underwear in an important moment, scared to fly, scared to be lonely, scared to fall ill, scared to age, scared to.... Well, scared people. I still can't make my head around this opening sequence. But I guess the idea is to give hope.
After all, Happy Family is a good-feeling film about life and beauty. And it's meant to celebrate both.