Whoever went to the cinema more than twice in his life knows that some films end and other don’t. There are rolling credits during which people get up and make their way hunched over between knees, abandoned coffee cups, and piles of popcorns to the exit, and other during which all stay sit, watching motionless names of strangers, waiting for an idea to take shape in their mind, the tears to dry, or for someone else to make the first brave move. Favolacce, the second directed as well as written by the D’Innocenzo brothers, is of this latter witchy breed.
Grown-up children awkwardly parented by a series of appallingly childish, useless, neurotic adults, are the strange souls with feral urges that populate a Roman summer of deafening cicadas.
Magnificently shot and interpreted, paced by the evocative music of Egisto Macchi1 and the ethereal voice of Rosemary Standley2, Favolacce is a suburban pastoral as true as the pages of a secret diary that seems to stir a reflection on what this generation is doing for the next and what kind of teaching is leaving behind.
Or maybe not. No matter. For as long as that doubt is alive, the spell cast by this special film will be with it, and so the desire to watch it again.
1. Egisto Macchi, Città notte, 1972. 2. Rosemary Standley & Dom La Nena, Birds on a Wire, 2014.
