Get tickets now for Open Roads: New Italian Cinema!
Roberto Andò brings his thoroughly enjoyable Viva La Libertà to New York’s Lincoln Center for Open Roads:New Italian Cinema, June 5 – 12. Andò will be there for a Q&A!
Take a look at my earlier review:
Only Italians are going to completely appreciate a movie like Roberto Andò’s political comedy Viva la Libertà, but Americans will be hearing echos of JFK’s “ask not” speech with the words from Bertolt Brecht : Non aspettarti nessuna risposta…oltre la tua, don’t wait for an answer, other than your own. And I think that we’ve all been paying enough attention to the actual, recent Italian political situation to know that a movie like this one will surely hit Italian nerves.
So when Enrico Oliveri, the secretary of the major opposition party, goes AWOL and hides out at an old girlfriend’s house in Paris (“What’s he doing here, Mom?” ” I think he just needs a little rest.”), an absurd and Pirandello-esque scenario works surprisingly well.
That he has a twin brother, and that twin brother is a bi-polar philosopher just recently released from a mental hospital, and that twin brother should be enlisted to impersonate the missing politician in his absence may seem nothing more than an Italian version of “The Parent Trap”, but it’s a lot more. The absurdity of today’s Italian government kind of requires a preposterous skewering, and Viva la Libertà is it. Do politicians need to go back to real life and “rest” once in a while to refresh their perspectives, and does a country sometimes need a madman to say the things that nobody else has the guts or the vision to say?
Well sure, but the problem is that it’s never going to happen, and so the optimism of the film’s message seems a little naive. But that’s its only problem. The cast (including Toni Servillo as the “twins”, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and Valerio Mastandrea) is outstanding, and Andò tells a story that, despite the zany premise, is very human, contemplative, and bittersweet.
Can a country be saved if a crazy person steps up and speaks the truth? If only it were that simple.
I Love Italian Everything 