Salty Air, L’aria Salata, has been sitting in my closet for a couple of years now and I’m not sure why I’d never wanted to watch it. They don’t all have to be chick flicks for me, but this is a prison movie – not my favorite genre. When I saw that it was available on Time Warner Cable on demand (and it is right now) and that it would soon be available for rent with Netflix (you can save it) I decided to give it a chance.
Never having been inside a prison I don’t know if they are not nearly as bad as depicted in HBO’s “OZ” or a whole lot worse than in Salty Air, but for all intents and purpose it doesn’t matter. There aren’t any prison rapes and the guard brutality is kept to a minimum but Salty Air feels real – at times almost documentary real. As it turns out that’s not by accident – writer and director Alessandro Angelini has made a few of them. Angelini tells the very anti-Hollywood story of Fabio, a prison educator ( social worker) that runs into his dad, an inmate who’s been transferred to his prison. He hasn’t seen his father since he’d abandoned the family when he was a child, and Fabio is at first full of anger and hostility.
In a movie that could easily have been laden with gratuitous sex and violence, Angelini gives us none. He shows us a broken father and son relationship without manipulating us with sentimental and emotional personal transformations. It’s stark, raw, and quiet, and I kept changing my mind about how I felt about the characters because even though it’s simple, it’s far from black and white. Fabio wants his father but even he isn’t sure how much his father deserves him.
The only superfluous thing in the movie is Emma, Fabio’s girlfriend, but I can see why Angelini put her there. I think that she represented the life that Fabio longs for but doesn’t feel that he’ll ever have, and this could have worked had it been properly developed.
Fabio is played by Giorgio Pasotti of L’ultimo Bacio and his father is played by Giorgio Colangeli, who won a David di Donatello award for this performance.
Salty Air (2006)
L’aria salata
Director: Alessandro Angelini
Writers: Alessandro Angelini, Angelo Carbone
Stars: Giorgio Pasotti, Michela Cescon and Giorgio Colangeli
I Love Italian Everything 