CANNES - A alcohol-driven, fast-paced road movie that follows the rhythms of Italian comedy as it crosses the landscapes of the vast Venetian plain, to examine how its contemporary inhabitants represent it. Le città di pianura, second work by Francesco Sossai, is in competition in Un Certain Regard, soon to be theatrically distributed by Lucky Red. It is an Italian-German co-production, produced by Vivo Film, Maze Pictures, Rai Cinema, with the contribution of the Ministry of Culture, with the support of Eurimages, Filmförderungsanstalt, Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien. The film was funded by the Veneto Region PR FESR 2021-2027 Call for Proposals in the second session of 2023.
The film stars Filippo Scotti, Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla in a story of friendship and emotional growth which develops around a shy, young architecture student’s encounter of with two slightly reckless fifty-year-olds who are obsessed with endlessly drinking "the last" glass. "Ours is a life based on consumption," notes Pierpaolo Capovilla, "the only true freedom we have left is consuming. In that sense, alcohol is a particular form of consumption, because you never have enough, you always want a little more, and then a little more, without interruption. So that potential “last” drink represents the absence of meaning in things and of things, in a film that questions the viewer, that does not provide answers but asks: "What are you doing?", "What do you want?", "What do you really want from your life?"
The characters that the protagonists meet in their wanderings include a worker with the surname Sossai, like the director who is originally from Belluno, which inserts a small autobiographical component as evidence of the authenticity of the narrated characters: "The film takes inspiration from what I know, from my land and from the people I have met" states the director, returning to Cannes, after his short Il compleanno di Enrico was presented at the 2023 Quinzaine. "I found it fun to use my surname, which is typical of the area, in a collective story. It's a way to put myself on the front line and demonstrate that that world really exists, that it's not invented".
A local and a universal story, the film was shot in various stages on the Veneto plain, between the provinces of Belluno and Treviso, Sedico, the Feltrino area, Padua, Chioggia, also Venice. Places that the director prefers to define as land rather than territory, considering the latter an overused term, linked more to a concept of commerce than belonging. This semantic shift says a lot about the fact that practically nothing remains of rural Veneto, as he notes: "What you sense in the countryside is an air of urban solitude. This is the main sensation I wanted to convey in the film; this countryside is no longer countryside but has not yet become city. It was an investigation into the soul of a region that has become a very rich cemetery; anything not merchandise is disappearing, ecosystems are polluted, old homes are abandoned or destroyed in favour of characterless residential construction. Peasant civilization belonged to a place; it was an emanation of the earth itself. The style of life that permeated these spaces for long centuries has now disappeared. You could say that I shot the film in the ruins of that Veneto”.
When he talks about his deep location research, Sossai compares himself to a photographer who takes a thousand photos and from them selects perhaps only ten. “I worked for many years in different places across the Veneto and I wrote many scenes by listening to the people I met, in bars, on public transport. Then, just like a photographer, I focus on the places that particularly interest me, that could be combined to give an idea of ??the complexity of this place”. To render this complexity, Sossai used a wide variety of places to avoid making judgements and limiting the choices to closed categories of “ugly” or “beautiful”.
The closing scene of the film was shot at the Brion memorial in the cemetery of San Vito (Treviso), a FAI property, which provided a location for the US blockbuster, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune II. It is a place that surrenders to the viewer's gaze and offers a moment of pause and reflection after the rapid shifts of multiple places that feature in the narrative up to that moment. The memorial is also a place for discovery and living: “When we go into Brion, I take the viewer in there as if it was a real visit happening inside the film. In a work where everything is in movement, passing very frenetically from one place to another, it was essential to me to make the viewer feel the concrete experience of being there. Brion is a place that I consider very important because I see it as a map. Offering the viewer a moment to enter such a significant space can be an interesting experience, especially in a film where, very often, the narrative forces you to follow other paths: to identify with the characters, follow the action, enter into the emotional dynamics. I also wanted there to be the possibility of truly inhabiting a place; in the end, paradoxically, it is the most vital space in the film”.