Available on the channel streaming Indiecinema the new film by Fabio Del Greco, Corona Days is an independent film poised between fiction and documentary. We had dealt with his self-sufficient and resistant cinema not many weeks ago, after viewing The smartphone woman .
A few weeks, but it already seems like a century. Because since then our habits (cinephiles and otherwise) have been completely upset by a health emergency (or perhaps dictatorship, depending on your point of view) which has temporarily canceled any instance of social aggregation, accentuating that monadic and solipsistic vocation of society contemporary unfortunately already emerged for some time.
Given this, it would perhaps be simplistic to define the one just made an instant movie , even if in part it is: in any case it is a subjective look at that Crazy world, which the spread of the global epidemic has made even more schizophrenic and vulnerable.
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Corona days: Film Journal of The Contagion
Obviously, the writer has public health at heart, like everyone else, yet the work of the Italian government, so weak at the beginning of the pandemic and then almost hysterical in accumulating bans on bans, some doubts about their own organizational skills and its overall view, may have legitimately placed it.
In Corona Days a film-maker as genuine and instinctive as Del Greco has reaped the fruits of the eccentric “cinediario” created in weeks of quarantine, filming his loneliness very closely, and at a safe distance that of associates and “relatives” (the connections with his girlfriend and artist friends are decidedly savory, above all a Chiara Pavoni whose epiphany also leaves her mark here ), just to mention a term that has sadly become fashionable.
But above all he took advantage of the few “air hours” granted, by decree, by Conte and his staff, to resume in Ostia and its surroundings a world emptied of humanity and subjected to strict and continuous police checks. All filtered by the gaze of an author who, as usual, knows how to be sly, disenchanted and subtly ironic, even when he puts his face to it as an interpreter.
From applause he surreal and daring interferences created by a hyperbolic virus, which, handcrafted digitally depicted, can be seen appearing around the people met in the supermarket, as if to exemplify a widespread paranoia, then even replacing the sun on the horizon of Ostia, in the guise of a parodic star. The effect here is as paradoxical as it is grotesque, mocking, irresistibly comic. Or tragicomic, to put it better.
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The Style of The Movie
Proceeding in the recognition of the real between melancholic ideas and flashes of irony, Fabio Del Greco then overcomes this first (and in any case very appreciable) instance, transforming his independent film in a game of Chinese boxes, in which heterogeneous audiovisual contributions come together, chronologically different, but all extremely stimulating and full of meaning. The short circuit between present and past that is created is well studied, even at the editing level, where the past is not just an almanac of memories but a further escape into the imagination.
Clips of daring trips to Turkey or the Philippines alternate with old family films, or scenes from the director’s very first films. It could have been a cauldron, and instead the choice of images always suggests a will, a fil rouge to follow to better understand the vision of the faded, dehumanized world, returned by the director in these long weeks of isolation.
Even through ritual comparisons. And with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the background, creating an even more dense, crepuscular atmosphere. From the emergence of u
Stefano Coccia
