Good intentions, in general, have a bad press. That and many sayings to discredit them. In addition, with them usually what happened to the character of ' Shame ' of Coetzee who barely saw one, he had a terrible desire to engage in pillage, looting or kicking cats. We are this old. Johnny Depp, for example, appeared on Friday at the Berlinale ready to blow up the bench, the one with the best intentions, and brought ' Minimata ' hand, of which he is the absolute protagonist and even producer. And the question that was just finished the projection is how a story so emotional, decisive and dignified can gather around so many common places, so many unnecessary repetitions, so many overtones out of tune. Probably, everything is the fault of good intentions.

The film tells the story of photographer W. Eugene Smith and of what would later be his wife Aileen M. Smith. The two went in 1971 to Minimata, the Japanese population known for the disease caused among its inhabitants by the ingestion of mercury discharged by the chemical industry. What emerged from that trip is one of the photographic reports, originally published in the magazine ' Life ', best known in the history of journalism. The film, directed by Andrew Levitas , parallels the physical, moral and alcoholic degradation of the protagonist with one of the most impurely insane and cruel ecological disasters in history. Obviously, it is a story of redemption.

Before the press, Depp himself did not tire of pointing out the importance of what was done beyond any trial or assessment. "Tapes like this are done very rarely and are necessary," he said between babbling with the mic practically inside his throat. "It's a movie," he insisted, "about the power of small people and, therefore, what counts is not so much a concrete case of the past but all those of the present in which a government or a large corporation decides to act without regard. ". And, the truth is that it costs to take the opposite. And more when, just with the projection still in the eyes, one runs to obtain the most basic data of what that brutality was. Eugene Smith's camera became a witness to the horror of the silence, the threat and the shamelessness of the authorities. And so from 1959, when the responsibility of mercury was proven, until 1971, the year in which the first sentence that condemned the chemical Chisso appeared.

The problem, obviously, is nothing in the previous paragraph. What does not work is what comes next, which is nothing more than the effort to blur the obviousness with the obviousness of a director dedicated to underlining everything, overreacting everything and overdoing the account . The effect achieved is just the opposite of the desired one. By narrating every second of glory and despair of the photographer, what is really important, what is photographed, ends up becoming a simple scenario, an excuse for misunderstood vanity (assuming there is a correct and moderate way of understanding vanity) .

Elio Germano

For the rest, the competition began, finally (seen so far was part of the Berlinale Special Gala section), with the first Italian film of the two scheduled. Giorgio Diritti presented 'Volevo nascondermi' (I wanted to hide) to the greatest glory of actor Elio Germano . Let's say the operation does not differ so much from Johnny Depp's proposal. As in ' Minimata ' it is about telling the story of a man in front of everyone, and as in the previous film, only each gesture is imported by the disproportionate force of the interpreter. The film tells the random and very suffered life of the naive painter Antonio Ligabue . From the most absolute of humiliations to triumph, to end again, like everyone else, without remedy.

Diritti's camera stops before Germano and stays there to live. All the sensitivity and tact shown by the director to capture and make the essentially free soul of a free man an almost physical element turns against the contempt shown before the most elementary rules of the measure. It seems contradictory the will to cancel any threat of conventional narration with the aim of telling everything, to exhibit everything. Germano falls into repetition with the same absence of criteria with which the film comes and goes aimlessly due to the artist's autobiography. Again, not even the best intentions, which also exist here, are enough.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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