SALON

Thursday, Mar 14, 2013 7:35 PM UTC

“Reality”: Toxic celebrity, Italian-style

Ordinary life is no match for "Big Brother" in a rich and fascinating satire from Italy's Matteo Garrone

By

Topics: Movies, Our Picks, Our Picks: Movies, Italy, Reality TV, Comedy,

No doubt the recent Italian comedy we should be watching this week is Nanni Moretti’s “Habemus Papam,” released last year, in which Michel Piccoli plays a newly elected pope who suffers a panic attack and refuses to greet the throngs in St. Peter’s Square. So far the reign of Pope Francis lacks that degree of zany melodrama, though he’s got time. But there are plenty of spiritual and cultural lessons to be dug out of Matteo Garrone’s colorful and intriguing “Reality” – the English word is also the Italian title – the farcical fable of a Neapolitan everyman seduced by the lure of celebrity.

If “Reality” isn’t quite as impressive as Garrone’s 2008 “Gomorrah,” an operatic and many-stranded saga about the long tentacles of Naples’ criminal underworld, it makes clear that he’s a filmmaker who can take a familiar story and infuse it with strangeness and vitality. While “Gomorrah” seemed more akin to the big-canvas social and moral criticism of the late Michelangelo Antonioni, “Reality” recalls other models – a little bit Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” and a whole bunch Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.”

Its hero is Luciano (Aniello Arena), a Neapolitan fishmonger, charmer and schemer in classic Italian working-class, amoral-protagonist mode. He lives by his wits, surrounded by an incessant riot of kids and extended family members, both through his seafood stand and a complicated scam whereby poor people order expensive “kitchen robots,” or high-tech food processors, and he “steals” them and resells them on the black market before they’ve even been unwrapped. In real life, Arena is a fascinating story – he’s a convict serving a long sentence for organized crime activities, who was discovered in a prison theater workshop. While authorities let him out by day to shoot with Garrone, he wasn’t allowed to attend the film’s premiere at Cannes last spring.

Unlike Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in “King of Comedy,” Luciano doesn’t start out obsessed with TV stardom. He’s reasonably well-adjusted and happy being the class clown of his lowlife social circle, at least until his niece (Giuseppina Cervizzi) and his wife (the terrific Loredana Simioli) thrust him into auditions for the Italian edition of “Big Brother,” based on a slight and incidental acquaintance with a previous winner known only as Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante). Italian trash culture is infamously trashier than that of almost any other country – although Russia and Latin America certainly have their great accomplishments in this area – and Garrone’s treatment of the buffoonish and meaningless celebrity of someone like Enzo isn’t even heavy-handed.

As for the idea that the lust for celebrity is a disabling illness, capable of dragging a well-grounded personality like Luciano down the rabbit hole of paranoia and self-regard, that is indeed something of a cliché. But I’d argue that the real story of “Reality” is less a media satire or a critique of reality TV than a tragedy about Italian society’s loss of cohesion and meaning. (Which was also, perhaps, the true subject of “Gomorrah.”) Garrone’s intimate portrayal of Luciano’s everyday life is wry, rich and affectionate; this guy has a wife and kids who adore him, and while his commercial endeavors may not be strictly legal, he’s never hurt anyone and is universally regarded as a good friend.

While I think it’s unlikely that Garrone is arguing in favor of the Catholic Church, “Reality” makes the point that religious faith used to provide a moral anchor for the society, and that watching two bikini-model types pretend to dry-hump in the “Big Brother” house is an inadequate substitute. When Luciano becomes convinced that reality-show producers are watching everything he does to judge his worthiness for stardom, his devout co-worker Michele (Nando Paone) reminds him that Someone Else is watching and judging too. Without quite realizing it, Luciano starts to emulate the lives of the saints: He feeds the hungry, gives away his wife’s imitation designer furniture to the poor and reads random events – customers from Rome, a cricket inside the house – as signs from an unseen power.

These thematic connections are made explicit, maybe too much so, in a sardonic-symbolic, ‘70s-style conclusion that I’m burning to discuss in detail but won’t right now. Let’s leave it this way: While “Reality” is a mixed bag of satire, allegory and melodrama, it’s a rich mixture that an American remake would likely never pull off. This is a movie that will reward multiple viewings, from a filmmaker of tremendous technical ability, humor and heart.

“Reality” opens this week at the Angelika Film Center in New York and March 22 at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. It opens March 29 in Boston and Chicago; April 5 in Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Washington; April 12 in Houston, Phoenix and Austin, Texas; April 19 in Atlanta, Denver, Detroit and Miami; April 26 in Las Vegas and St. Louis; May 3 in Dallas; and May 10 in Salt Lake City and Tucson, Ariz., with more cities and home video to follow.

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • This photo. President Barack Obama has a laugh during the unveiling of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Tx., Thursday. Former first lady Barbara Bush, who candidly admitted this week we've had enough Bushes in the White House, is unamused.
    Reuters/Jason Reed

  • Rescue workers converge Wednesday in Savar, Bangladesh, where the collapse of a garment building killed more than 300. Factory owners had ignored police orders to vacate the work site the day before.
    AP/A.M. Ahad

  • Police gather Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to honor campus officer Sean Collier, who was allegedly killed in a shootout with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects last week.
    AP/Elise Amendola

  • Police tape closes the site of a car bomb that targeted the French embassy in Libya Tuesday. The explosion wounded two French guards and caused extensive damage to Tripoli's upscale al-Andalus neighborhood.
    AP/Abdul Majeed Forjani

  • Protestors rage outside the residence of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Sunday following the rape of a 5-year-old girl in New Delhi. The girl was allegedly kidnapped and tortured before being abandoned in a locked room for two days.
    AP/Manish Swarup

  • Clarksville, Mo., residents sit in a life boat Monday after a Mississippi River flooding, the 13th worst on record.
    AP/Jeff Roberson

  • Workers pause Wednesday for a memorial service at the site of the West, Tx., fertilizer plant explosion, which killed 14 people and left a crater more than 90 feet wide.
    AP/The San Antonio Express-News, Tom Reel

  • Aerial footage of the devastation following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in China's Sichuan province last Saturday. At least 180 people were killed and as many as 11,000 injured in the quake.
    AP/Liu Yinghua

  • On Wednesday, Hazmat-suited federal authorities search a martial arts studio in Tupelo, Miss., once operated by Everett Dutschke, the newest lead in the increasingly twisty ricin case. Last week, President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker, R.-Miss., and a Mississippi judge were each sent letters laced with the deadly poison.
    AP/Rogelio V. Solis

  • The lighting of Freedom Hall at the George W. Bush Presidential Center Thursday is celebrated with (what else but) red, white and blue fireworks.
    AP/David J. Phillip

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 1 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Would we give up burgers to stop climate change? New study suggests if we reduce our intake of animal products by 25%, we can halt climate change
635 points636 points | 267 comments
vote
Facebook has been used to find ex-lovers, childhood BFFs or the one who got away. He used it to find the guy who, without his consent, made him his drug mule.
240 points241 points | 22 comments
vote
“This could be a career ender for Michele Bachmann”
142 points143 points | 60 comments
vote
Poll: 3 in 10 voters say “armed revolution might be necessary” - 29% say they believe they'll have to act "in order to protect our liberties" in the next few years
45 points46 points | 16 comments
vote
Capitalism, not feminism, killed home cooking–and fixing our broken food system is gonna take a lot more than some privileged women embracing “new domesticity”
36 points37 points | 19 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: "The Shelter Cycle": Raised in a cult

Recommendations