There are stories that can only be told if you make truly independent films: low budget, a limited number of shooting days, actors you know, who are your friends, who have shared with you words, dreams, beers in abundance.

This is a marvellous cinema. A cinema that allows you to cross little-travelled, unpredictable territories, full of risks and uncertainties. An anomalous, fantastic world, capable of generating thoughts and memories in those who listen to you, things that you will carry inside you for a long time, precious luggage, made of resistant, impertinent, indecent, unspeakable material, to which you have to give your own twist and which, once finished, will become a home, something your thoughts will love to dwell in.

Angelo Orlando‘s cinema is this: rich in fluctuations, anomalous, wonderfully imprecise, capable of traversing worlds according to the strategies of the voluptuous and the sensual, a territory where feelings and love are the protagonists – that’s why “imprecise”: there is no possibility of defining borders, of establishing reasons. Everything moves within a continuous flow, a flow that is generated by the unconscious, by the liquidity of unstable thoughts.

This is what happens in Rocco tiene tu nombre: the magical world that envelops the story tries to hold together the threads of memory, of the sense of friendship, of the devastating need that love generates. The story seems to arise from a desire and a search, from the hypothesis that our life is wider than it seems, more abundant, that it overflows into a fantastic place that we somehow intuit but cannot define. That is why, in the story, several destinies cross, many feelings, infinite emotions whose logic escapes us.

How many worlds must we cross before we understand? Angelo Orlando doesn’t give solutions, he doesn’t hypothesize endings – he prefers to accompany us into a world governed by dreams, by drives, by pleasures, by uncertainties, by certain infinite despairs.

The two male figures (Bobo/Rocco) intertwine their lives, exchange them, but the problems remain the same, the solutions are pursued, the pains persist. To be abandoned, to lose an important love, to attempt a recovery capable of putting things right, capable of rebuilding a balance that obviously cannot exist. And if our woman falls in love with another woman, the shock generates an excess of astonishment which, here, is handled with drama (there is no irony but pain, pain sharpened by the memory, by nostalgia).

Changing the course of things, delegating, passing the buck to an intimate, imaginary companion who magically becomes real, slips into our lives and takes everything away from us.

The alternative is to start again, to acquire new experiences, to re-enter the game in a final attempt to regain one’s own territory, a territory not particularly wanted, sought after, desired.

Bobo is forced to take part in this mythical journey to the last step: the experience of death that will allow him, at last, to be reborn. But it is a rebirth that carries with it no heroism, no resounding transformation. It is a magic that is capable “only” of a brief, deep, personal, revealing, clear awareness.

And Angelo Orlando rightly stays within the dynamics that only poetry can allow: his light touch is found in the words of the characters, in the looks of the actors, in the perplexities and doubts that emotions spontaneously generate. The aim is not to recompose the picture, to close a circle, to reassure us by recovering a meaning (so that everything makes sense). Here one is content to be able to say to oneself: I did well, things had to be this way, there are no other ways, there are no other solutions. The enjoyment lies in having found someone who has really been able to be there for us, maybe just for a moment. Someone we let in and who was able to touch our soul, that thing that is not inside us but all around us, that impalpable garden full of harmonies and good smells.

1 Novembre 2018 by Demetrio Salvi

1 Novembre 2018 © REPRODUCTION RESERVED SENTIERISELVAGGI.IT (Read the original article in Italian)