Paolo Strippoli had co-directed A Classic Horror Story with De Feo (by the way, I never reviewed that film but seeing it a second time it grew on me much more).
De Feo had previously directed, alone , that jewel of The Nest.
Now seeing this Piove makes me connect the dots and note an elective affinity and an artistic/human harmony between the two directors.
Who, to put it briefly, they shot the two best Italian horror films of recent years.
Two horror films that excel above all in their dramatic side, in being so "precise" in describing human relationships, in the extreme sensitivity that runs through them.
We are in Rome, in times that are not specified but which could easily be ours.
Underground, in the sewers, there is a substance which, by evaporating, makes people angry, more and more angry.
It's Raining is, first of all, a courageous film.
Because it narrates the family hells in a dry, direct, very harsh way.
The relationship between the father Thomas and the son Enrico kills you, it hurts, not only because it is masterfully constructed, but because you perceive its "truth". Seeing the film your heart aches not so much for that family (in which the figure of the little girl becomes poignant) but because, or at least this happened to me, you are reminded of all those millions of real families in which those dynamics take place .
In which there is no love (or rather, there is something stronger than love that does not allow this to manifest itself), in which you see a father and a son hating each other, in which there are figures who are no longer there (the dead mother) and others who are instead defenseless spectators of that lack of love, of that anger. From personal experience, being spectators of hatred and anger between two people you love and who you think should love each other kills you as much as if you were yourself in that vortex of hatred.
And It's Raining in this is magnificent, radical , extreme.
The figure of Enrico (a crazy Francesco Gheghi) is the best that cinematographic writing can offer in telling us about a teenager who was happy (those flashbacks at the end are truly moving), who suffered a trauma devastating of which he is also absolutely guilty and which from then on, either out of pain, or out of a sense of guilt, or out of an absolute feeling of emptiness (it is no coincidence that he seeks love in a 45-year-old prostitute, figure - the only one - who can replace the mother) and also for a "pretext" for which the blame can be "transferred" to the father (he had to take the car), well, the teenager who comes out of this hell is exactly that character, a character in in which the internal wounds are exactly reified by the external ones too, by the scars left on the face.
Scars for him, his little sister in a wheelchair, a tragedy which in any case would already be impossible to forget, even more so it will never be able to be overcome because the consequences it left are always there, visible, terrible.
A family literally devastated, eaten inside and scarred outside which also has the paradoxical "misfortune" of having been first instead a beautiful family (because if tragedy strikes a status quo of happiness it leaves even greater wounds and consequences - and anger).
For me it's raining, beyond all the other aspects, it would have been a great film even just for the ruthless tale of this microcosm.
And certainly Enrico's family is the perfect seed from which the fruit of hatred that Piove tells can be born.
We are in a society and in a world more and more nervous, more and more stressed.
And so that "smoke" that comes from the sewers is not an external agent that changes us, that injects anger or hatred into a world that is instead full of love. No, the world is still going crazy, people are truly increasingly mean and exasperated, family relationships, especially with teenagers involved, are increasingly delicate.
And so I find that smoking rather than seeing it as a cause of I instead see everything that will happen as a consequence of what we already are.
To trivialize the matter, I see it only as the classic icing on a cake of hatred that we have already prepared some time ago.
It is the world that created it, a world in any case already close to collapse, having reached the limit, and now by breathing that thing it can "finally" overcome that limit.
And here Piove, in addition to the extraordinary accuracy of home hells, becomes for me also one of the 3-4 most incisive titles in telling these 3 incredible years that we have lived in the Covid era.
Yes, many films have sold themselves as films "about Covid" without having given me anything in that sense while It's Raining, without saying it (and perhaps without even intending to) is instead one of the films that best told me about these two and a half years, this increasingly strong intolerance, this lack of understanding each other, these increasingly difficult coexistences, this anger and this hatred daughters of an incredible situation that we are unable to live.
In the film there is a joke (in the mother's flashback to her birthday) about outbreaks.
Maybe it has nothing to do with Covid but I have this recognized in the film, the world of these two years.
Leaving aside the themes for a moment (but Piove's main strength is certainly in those and in the metaphor it tells) there are many aspects to analyse.
Needless to say, not everything works.
I found the 2/3 "group" gang scenes very weak, quite banal.
Moreover, the film adds some secondary characters to create a broader context but which, in my opinion, adds nothing to the film, on the contrary, it gives us the idea of ​​choices thrown out there that we didn't even believe in too much (I'm thinking for example of the character played by Ondina Quadri).
By the way, it's clear how Strippoli (or whoever for him) has done a remarkable casting job and follows the best Italian cinema, given that we find young people who have been unforgettable protagonists of some recent gems of our cinema, such as Leon de la Vallee of the beautiful La terra dei bambini or Quadri herself of that sensational debut that is Piccolo Corpo.
Here, the boy from the gang who sees little Martina again in the ending, that of Quadri, that of the security guard (reviewable scene. ..) and perhaps even a couple more... they seem to be absolutely avoidable additions.
But this film has one merit, among many.
Namely that of becoming more and more beautiful, more and more convincing, more and more engaging, in an inexorable climax that matches perfectly with the climax of the diegesis, that of increasingly stronger anger and hatred.
And the last half hour, there is little to do, it is pure horror, in a a film that I instead thought was "just" a drama with horror undertones.
No, Piove is horror, not viewable by those who really can't get close to this genre.
Right choice, wrong?
I approve of it, because we absolutely need genre films that manage to include so much more, to go in depth, to express sensitivity, while not coming out of the same genre.
The first "infected" woman who screams, the "oil" man (Orso Maria Guerrini's son), the superb scene in alternate editing of the mother-monster who incites hatred to both her son that the husband, the whole ending, well, Piove dresses up as horror without ambiguity, in a direct and shouted way.
And it works great there too, so much so that the last half hour there is never really a moment of breath.
And yet the film (which has an amazing soundtrack, with a couple of exciting pieces, and truly evocative photography) had had the strength to give its best in the realistic scenes, in that little girl who the father leaves her standing without helping her (it may seem like a cruel scene but it is just a desperate father who, in an extreme way, wants to give his daughter the strength to react), in those scenes between Enrico and Gianluca which seem to re-watch 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins , in the devastating - and very well constructed - flashback of the accident, practically a prologue that arrives at the end of the film (the choice of balloons is brilliant, terrible and heartbreaking, especially for how it links all 3 characters. The little girl wanted them, he will make one explode because of a joke, the mother will lose control).
But the ending, an ending that many will find rhetorical, is the most beautiful and strong thing we could have expected.
That mother-monster (be careful, the mother is always depicted to us as monstrous, evil, avenger, but in reality she is the exact opposite, we know this from the flashbacks. That mother is shown to us like this because it is a metaphor for what she has become for that family, or rather a demon that does not go away, the reason why father and son hate each other. Their hatred, born from the death of the woman, is reified in her. So that is not the "external" image of the mother , but the one that they have generated), I was saying, that monster mother who drags herself towards them, increasingly weaker, more and more shapeless, and who in the last seconds holds out her hand to them is an impressive metaphor of what is happening, of that 'having found each other, having recognized each other, having "remembered" what they were. And this is all thanks to another extraordinary figure, that of the daughter who, as we will see later with her mother, had dragged herself towards them.
It is impossible not to be moved by this figure who in such a painful, almost humiliating way, seeks to reach them, try to make them open their eyes, try to remove the blanket of hatred and anger that has now invaded them (and how beautiful that all this is represented by this very black slime-oil that increasingly covers our body and face, this it's hatred).
"I hate you" she herself will say, the only figure who doesn't even know what hatred is.
It's a fake hatred, a devastated love, which however serves to father and brother to "awaken".
Only with Babadook and with the recent Relic had I felt so much emotion in a scene which from being "monstrous" instead tells of gigantic things underneath.
Then everyone goes out and finds a world of half.
Many have killed each other.
Those who haven't done so are standing embraced.
Rhetoric?
No, those who see it as rhetorical are afraid to face the truth.
And the truth is what this beautiful ending shows us.
An ending that tells only one thing.
From these hells of hatred, anger, disaffection and misunderstanding we saves only with the opposite, with understanding, with empathy, with love.
And Piove doesn't even talk about universal love, it's no coincidence that all the nuclei we see are families.
Piove has the courage to enter "alone" into this very delicate, decisive, very often terrible world that is the family.
And yes, only by embracing each other, only by understanding each other, only by exchanging affection and love can a family save itself.
/>Either we are standing together or we are on the ground, killed, wounded, ruined forever.
You must understand this.
And if you mock an ending like this it is because these concepts scare you and if someone it transforms them into images in such an explicit way that it seems ridiculous to you.
No, that's how it is, with love you stand, with hate you die and kill.
And if you can't do it do it yourself to realize it, I hope that one day a little girl who cannot walk will crawl towards you to make you understand.
And if you don't understand it even in that way it is inevitable and right that your soul becomes more and more black and muddy.
And no rain will be able to save you anymore
7.5
De Feo had previously directed, alone , that jewel of The Nest.
Now seeing this Piove makes me connect the dots and note an elective affinity and an artistic/human harmony between the two directors.
Who, to put it briefly, they shot the two best Italian horror films of recent years.
Two horror films that excel above all in their dramatic side, in being so "precise" in describing human relationships, in the extreme sensitivity that runs through them.
We are in Rome, in times that are not specified but which could easily be ours.
Underground, in the sewers, there is a substance which, by evaporating, makes people angry, more and more angry.
It's Raining is, first of all, a courageous film.
Because it narrates the family hells in a dry, direct, very harsh way.
The relationship between the father Thomas and the son Enrico kills you, it hurts, not only because it is masterfully constructed, but because you perceive its "truth". Seeing the film your heart aches not so much for that family (in which the figure of the little girl becomes poignant) but because, or at least this happened to me, you are reminded of all those millions of real families in which those dynamics take place .
In which there is no love (or rather, there is something stronger than love that does not allow this to manifest itself), in which you see a father and a son hating each other, in which there are figures who are no longer there (the dead mother) and others who are instead defenseless spectators of that lack of love, of that anger. From personal experience, being spectators of hatred and anger between two people you love and who you think should love each other kills you as much as if you were yourself in that vortex of hatred.
And It's Raining in this is magnificent, radical , extreme.
The figure of Enrico (a crazy Francesco Gheghi) is the best that cinematographic writing can offer in telling us about a teenager who was happy (those flashbacks at the end are truly moving), who suffered a trauma devastating of which he is also absolutely guilty and which from then on, either out of pain, or out of a sense of guilt, or out of an absolute feeling of emptiness (it is no coincidence that he seeks love in a 45-year-old prostitute, figure - the only one - who can replace the mother) and also for a "pretext" for which the blame can be "transferred" to the father (he had to take the car), well, the teenager who comes out of this hell is exactly that character, a character in in which the internal wounds are exactly reified by the external ones too, by the scars left on the face.
Scars for him, his little sister in a wheelchair, a tragedy which in any case would already be impossible to forget, even more so it will never be able to be overcome because the consequences it left are always there, visible, terrible.
A family literally devastated, eaten inside and scarred outside which also has the paradoxical "misfortune" of having been first instead a beautiful family (because if tragedy strikes a status quo of happiness it leaves even greater wounds and consequences - and anger).
For me it's raining, beyond all the other aspects, it would have been a great film even just for the ruthless tale of this microcosm.
And certainly Enrico's family is the perfect seed from which the fruit of hatred that Piove tells can be born.
We are in a society and in a world more and more nervous, more and more stressed.
And so that "smoke" that comes from the sewers is not an external agent that changes us, that injects anger or hatred into a world that is instead full of love. No, the world is still going crazy, people are truly increasingly mean and exasperated, family relationships, especially with teenagers involved, are increasingly delicate.
And so I find that smoking rather than seeing it as a cause of I instead see everything that will happen as a consequence of what we already are.
To trivialize the matter, I see it only as the classic icing on a cake of hatred that we have already prepared some time ago.
It is the world that created it, a world in any case already close to collapse, having reached the limit, and now by breathing that thing it can "finally" overcome that limit.
And here Piove, in addition to the extraordinary accuracy of home hells, becomes for me also one of the 3-4 most incisive titles in telling these 3 incredible years that we have lived in the Covid era.
Yes, many films have sold themselves as films "about Covid" without having given me anything in that sense while It's Raining, without saying it (and perhaps without even intending to) is instead one of the films that best told me about these two and a half years, this increasingly strong intolerance, this lack of understanding each other, these increasingly difficult coexistences, this anger and this hatred daughters of an incredible situation that we are unable to live.
In the film there is a joke (in the mother's flashback to her birthday) about outbreaks.
Maybe it has nothing to do with Covid but I have this recognized in the film, the world of these two years.
Leaving aside the themes for a moment (but Piove's main strength is certainly in those and in the metaphor it tells) there are many aspects to analyse.
Needless to say, not everything works.
I found the 2/3 "group" gang scenes very weak, quite banal.
Moreover, the film adds some secondary characters to create a broader context but which, in my opinion, adds nothing to the film, on the contrary, it gives us the idea of ​​choices thrown out there that we didn't even believe in too much (I'm thinking for example of the character played by Ondina Quadri).
By the way, it's clear how Strippoli (or whoever for him) has done a remarkable casting job and follows the best Italian cinema, given that we find young people who have been unforgettable protagonists of some recent gems of our cinema, such as Leon de la Vallee of the beautiful La terra dei bambini or Quadri herself of that sensational debut that is Piccolo Corpo.
Here, the boy from the gang who sees little Martina again in the ending, that of Quadri, that of the security guard (reviewable scene. ..) and perhaps even a couple more... they seem to be absolutely avoidable additions.
But this film has one merit, among many.
Namely that of becoming more and more beautiful, more and more convincing, more and more engaging, in an inexorable climax that matches perfectly with the climax of the diegesis, that of increasingly stronger anger and hatred.
And the last half hour, there is little to do, it is pure horror, in a a film that I instead thought was "just" a drama with horror undertones.
No, Piove is horror, not viewable by those who really can't get close to this genre.
Right choice, wrong?
I approve of it, because we absolutely need genre films that manage to include so much more, to go in depth, to express sensitivity, while not coming out of the same genre.
The first "infected" woman who screams, the "oil" man (Orso Maria Guerrini's son), the superb scene in alternate editing of the mother-monster who incites hatred to both her son that the husband, the whole ending, well, Piove dresses up as horror without ambiguity, in a direct and shouted way.
And it works great there too, so much so that the last half hour there is never really a moment of breath.
And yet the film (which has an amazing soundtrack, with a couple of exciting pieces, and truly evocative photography) had had the strength to give its best in the realistic scenes, in that little girl who the father leaves her standing without helping her (it may seem like a cruel scene but it is just a desperate father who, in an extreme way, wants to give his daughter the strength to react), in those scenes between Enrico and Gianluca which seem to re-watch 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins , in the devastating - and very well constructed - flashback of the accident, practically a prologue that arrives at the end of the film (the choice of balloons is brilliant, terrible and heartbreaking, especially for how it links all 3 characters. The little girl wanted them, he will make one explode because of a joke, the mother will lose control).
But the ending, an ending that many will find rhetorical, is the most beautiful and strong thing we could have expected.
That mother-monster (be careful, the mother is always depicted to us as monstrous, evil, avenger, but in reality she is the exact opposite, we know this from the flashbacks. That mother is shown to us like this because it is a metaphor for what she has become for that family, or rather a demon that does not go away, the reason why father and son hate each other. Their hatred, born from the death of the woman, is reified in her. So that is not the "external" image of the mother , but the one that they have generated), I was saying, that monster mother who drags herself towards them, increasingly weaker, more and more shapeless, and who in the last seconds holds out her hand to them is an impressive metaphor of what is happening, of that 'having found each other, having recognized each other, having "remembered" what they were. And this is all thanks to another extraordinary figure, that of the daughter who, as we will see later with her mother, had dragged herself towards them.
It is impossible not to be moved by this figure who in such a painful, almost humiliating way, seeks to reach them, try to make them open their eyes, try to remove the blanket of hatred and anger that has now invaded them (and how beautiful that all this is represented by this very black slime-oil that increasingly covers our body and face, this it's hatred).
"I hate you" she herself will say, the only figure who doesn't even know what hatred is.
It's a fake hatred, a devastated love, which however serves to father and brother to "awaken".
Only with Babadook and with the recent Relic had I felt so much emotion in a scene which from being "monstrous" instead tells of gigantic things underneath.
Then everyone goes out and finds a world of half.
Many have killed each other.
Those who haven't done so are standing embraced.
Rhetoric?
No, those who see it as rhetorical are afraid to face the truth.
And the truth is what this beautiful ending shows us.
An ending that tells only one thing.
From these hells of hatred, anger, disaffection and misunderstanding we saves only with the opposite, with understanding, with empathy, with love.
And Piove doesn't even talk about universal love, it's no coincidence that all the nuclei we see are families.
Piove has the courage to enter "alone" into this very delicate, decisive, very often terrible world that is the family.
And yes, only by embracing each other, only by understanding each other, only by exchanging affection and love can a family save itself.
/>Either we are standing together or we are on the ground, killed, wounded, ruined forever.
You must understand this.
And if you mock an ending like this it is because these concepts scare you and if someone it transforms them into images in such an explicit way that it seems ridiculous to you.
No, that's how it is, with love you stand, with hate you die and kill.
And if you can't do it do it yourself to realize it, I hope that one day a little girl who cannot walk will crawl towards you to make you understand.
And if you don't understand it even in that way it is inevitable and right that your soul becomes more and more black and muddy.
And no rain will be able to save you anymore
7.5
