Gianluca is a young man that finds it more and more difficult to cope with life’s contradictions and sorrows; climbing on the Coliseum seems to be the only way to leave everything behind. As he climbs, he frees himself from the intrusive reality, the cynic indifference of the pestering mass media, while his confused and superficial friends are unintentionally staging hilarious scenes on their way to the Coliseum. Gianluca’s grandmother also reaches the top of the Coliseum. She both reminds him of childhood’s playfulness and shares with him her lightness, typical of people that have lived a long life and learned to accept life as it is. Her arrival seems to be the key to save him…A world of survivors, a frightened world. Gianluca will help these young men and women that will slow down their pointless wandering to look inside themselves.Maybe.
NOTE
The film “Ce n’è per tutti” draws its inspiration from early Italian filmmaking. It portrays the characters overwhelmed by an absorbing and colourful reality. The same reality becomes a portrayal of contemporary human society and its contradictions.
This is the story as it begins, but as we proceed we find sharper and brighter tones in it, at times grotesque and even surreal; all of this in order to draw the attention on the contradictions and the emotional chaos the characters go through. This chaos is mirrored on the outside and embodies itself in a city, Rome – “the most beautiful in the world”, as one of the characters calls it – although it appears on the edge of equitime point caused by massive traffic and lack of communication.
The core of the story takes place in this crazy and vibrant setting:Gianluca makes an unexpected choice as he experiences the meaninglessness of his own existence, which feels more as survival and not real life.
He climbs on the Coliseum – the symbol of the Eternal City and its history, witness of unspeakable cruelty and of the Time passing by – most probably to give himself, and the world around him, some kind of meaning to finally find something to live for. His friends react to his call for help as they can, with the usual unaware and resigned superficiality.
The rescue of a friend suddenly becomes their drive, their battle against the lack of action in everyday life. But it soon turns out to be a hollow experience of getting together instead of a real urge to save a life. They still miss out on the chance of personal meditation the event would suggest, by the baffling of words and the absurdity of the situations they get caught up in.
Our friends dream of being heroes but are really just victims of a reality ruled by mass media and its made up disasters that take away the attention from the real ones. Society forces them to a “rescue” or rehabilitation of a human being without asking why or even considering the reasons for such a extreme act.
And the mass media – that break the news of his suicide attempt – are the co-star leading characters of the story. Newslines are out on television showing all their power. They get the young man’s parents to record a message to save their son’s life: a message that should be meant for salvation, but it just shows, once more, its lack of meaning and absence of feelings.
Luckily enough, in a noisy world spinning too fast, way too real and well known, there is a person that stands tall against it and that might be the only chance of salvation for Gianluca.
It’s his grandmother, a strong woman with firm values that might seem old-fashioned but that are vital and fundamental to Gianluca that sees them as poetic, truthful, incredibly modern and even revolutionary. These values belong to a woman that has lived a full life. She has witnessed war, fear, pain, hunger and by no means in television; she has also lived and experienced the real joys that are part of the beauty of life in its simpler essence.
This woman, at the same time slender and strong, climbs on the Coliseum pushed by a mysterious strength that has everything to do with the purest love, always on the edge between reality and dream.
His grandmother is real, tangible and practical, while everybody else around conducts a hypnotic and padded life completely unaware of all that is happening. In a world where the “living” force the dead into cemeterial “archives” only to dust them out when needed, and push into the subways’ underground the “living dead”, the cast away both physically and mentally ill.
We wonder if Gianluca will find the courage to go back to the world he abandoned; victim of his sensitiveness that allows him to look this world straight in the eyes. Gianluca knows what despair is, the same despair that the others refuse to see. His climbing on the Coliseum is a statement against the marketing of poetry and the arts in general. Arts that nowadays have a price but not a value.
The main idea of this movie is to bring on screen two realities that stand apparently apart from one another: on one side a super-realistic reality, raw and tragically comic, filmed with swift camera movements and long sequences shot that plunge the viewer into to plot; on the other side a made up world, almost unreal, surrounded by clouds where we find Gianluca looking for a long lost Eden. Classic shots and reverse shots, soft tracking shots and wide shots on the city to enhance the “rarefied” atmosphere and to help description of how the characters feel.
On one hand we are faced with the verbal and acoustic violence of a city that is on a rollercoaster ride to an unknown destination and on the other, the serene silence of a hermitage quietly observing life below. The same silence is an invitation to slow down and start remembering, pondering and meditating.
The choice of the comedy genre helps both the identification process and the suspension of disbelief of the audience. The friends and couples in the film are portrayed as standard comedic characters taken from the mute movies era, the American and Italian movie tradition that gave worldwide stardom to unforgettable actors.
The final phase will sum up all the chaotic and surreal clash of events, the same events that up to this point caused laughs and amazement.
