Italy picks 'Don't Be Bad' for foreign-language Oscar bid
ADV
ADV
Italy picks 'Don't Be Bad' for foreign-language Oscar bid

Italy picks 'Don't Be Bad' for foreign-language Oscar bid

di lettura
(AGI) Rome, Sept 28 - "Don't Be Bad", a film by ClaudioCaligari, has been chosen as Italy's foreign-language Oscarcandidate. It was selected from a short list of nine by theNational Association of Film, Audiovisual and MultimediaIndustries committee. Five nominations will be announced onJan. 14, and the sought-after Oscar statuettes will bepresented in Los Angeles on Feb. 28. "A vision of the endresult of Pasolini's world," was how the director explained themeaning of his last film, which was released on Sept. 8 andshown at the Venice Film Festival. He died shortly aftercompleting the second edit of the film, on May 26. His friend,film producer Valerio Mastandrea, who had been with thedirector for much of the filming, oversaw supervision of thefinal edits. The film refers to "Toxic Love", the 1983 cultmovie and natural heir to Pier Pasolini's films about people insmall towns. It is set in Ostia, on the coast outside Rome, in1995, and features drug dealers and members of the underworld(before the Mafia Capitale Investigation). It also includesextreme and realistic desperate characters sharing a"small-town mentality", who believe going to work is "a trulyunknown concept". In his film the director describes the end ofPasolini's film "Accattone", all the hustlers and drug addictslinked by an almost anthropological common thread. Work spellsthe end of an era, of a narrative strand and of a fascinatingand cursed reality, when one of the new drug addicts (the oneswho chew and sniff cocaine but cannot bring themselves to shootup) decides to embrace a new life and find a job. As he says inhis director's notes, this decision "sanctions the definitive,total and irreversible homologation [affirming] of villageotherness". The main characters are two firm friends, Cesare(similar to the protagonist of "Toxic Love") played by LucaMarinelli, and Vittorio (Alessandro Borghi). It is anindissoluble friendship between two youths who spend theirlives dealing drugs, taking drugs, stealing and living from dayto day in Ostia, where the Mafia has yet to arrive. "Don't BeBad" is the concluding part of the director's trilogy, "TheScent of the Night" was released in 1998, rounding off anartistic and cultural journey. The film's best line, spoken byCesare, sums up the director's work: "Life is hard, and ifyou're not as hard as life, you get nowhere.". .
ADV