The Wedding Director

Il regista di matrimoni
(Marco Bellochio / Italy / 2006)




A Wedding.

A religious ceremony, set in a church. The choir chants, the bride and bridegroom seem happy, and the guests are there. But when the camera notices the gloomy face of Franco Elica (Sergio Castellito) we suddenly realize that something must be amiss. The rest of this sequence will be a slow but steady descent into the banality and cruelty of our modern society in the setting of present day Italy.
We learn that Elica is a somewhat famous wedding director, and that’s even the role he is supposed to play in this particular event, while numerous cameras already pierce the bodies of the newlyweds, exposing their personas to the public, intruding into their privacy and threatening to take away their dignity. The intimacy Franco achieves through the use of a digital camera on the monitor is revealed to be a very repugnant act of voyeurism in reality. The beauty we see through Elicas eyes on the monitor, can be seen only in this restricted space, with the bigger picture revealing the ugliness which surrounds the moment. Maybe a desperate attempt from the director to resist the surrounding reality, what is ultimately exposed is not only the lie inherent in the event, but the falseness of cinema itself. At first a reason for utter despair, the other side of the coin is also the possibility of cinema to construct a different truth. When unable to reveal, the utopic goal of a reorganization of life, another kind of realization of the world, becomes desirable. An old dream that was already proclaimed during the 1920s by the likes of Dziga Vertov or Luis Bunuel. Marco Bellochio will prove to be an ardent follower of this visionary concept, though the 21st century remains a rough place for an idealist. The past 100 years of additional human experience haven’t made it any easier.
But before we get to see the light,. Bellochio pushess us even deeper into the mud. A shoe, pieces of lace, people stumbling into each others arms, a sentence whispered into Franco’s apathetic countenance. “I will never forget you” – the promise of an old lover. Still, the worst seems the wedding itself, the occurrence of the event in its totality. When the bridegroom doesn’t know you at the wedding of your daughter…

Elica is fed up with the world from the beginning of the film. Like a living dead he seems to barely manage to stay on his feet, keeping his mouth shut most of the time, and when it says something it seems like the epitome of half-heartedness. If his introduction in the film already revealed him to be disconnected from his surroundings, it becomes obvious pretty fast that he has also become disconnected from himself. Not knowing what he is actually doing, let alone why, he is a lost, dejected, estranged and completely @#%$ up shell of the person he once might have been. All of the awkwardness which can be felt during the first minutes of the film reflects this. As a viewer we are thrusted into this surreal situation, and the task which is set for the protagonist becomes our own. As he will be trying to find some sense in his life we will be doing the same.
At an audition a woman falls on her knees in front of his feet, in front of our feet. The line between fiction and reality gets blurred again, and just what exactly is the commentator on TV proclaiming this very moment? When the sound gets turned on we are informed that a famous director has just died. On top of all that Elica gets accused of raping an actress, something which is probably very close to the truth. The meaning of truth is another question which this film poses in an admirable way.

As life always moves in a spiral, we will get many beautiful fragments of it in Bellochio’s new film. Technically versatile, the expediency of the kinematic contraption in regard to the production design elements will be a delicate issue. The mixing of various narrative forms is accompanied by the use of a disrupted but interconnected system of different camera formats as Bellochio tries to adapt a sampling common in music to the possibilities of his film.
What else is there? Let me see. After Elica drops off the train at an unknown location, there will be a count, a princess, and yes, another wedding. But more important than the wedding is love itself. In the setting of this fairy-tale, Elica will attempt to recover it. Who would have believed it? There will be numerous resurrections, on various levels, and I even forgot to mention the castle and the fireworks, let alone the magical bonds of friendship. But it’s still a rough world, and poetry alone sometimes isn’t enough. Learning a lesson or two, our protagonist will also acquire a talisman when he meets a black guy on yet another train.
The poem itself will end on a train, though sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between an end and a beginning. Isn’t there always an ending in a beginning, or vice versa?

Contrary to Jean-Luc Godard, the cinema is alive with Marco Bellochio, it’s bursting with life, not only opening up spaces for reflection, but trying to open up life itself. Magic should be the one word to describe this film, when the unresolved ambiguities point not only to the mystery inherent in every cinematic experience, but to the mystery of life itself. For what else is this world, if not a chaotic mess where it’s hard trying to find any sense. Nevertheless, it’s well worth trying to do exactly that. Like Il regista di matrimoni, life is what you make of it.

The End.

Oh, but didn’t we forget something? Exactly – the question of Truth.
Bellochio’s answer makes for one of the most interesting you will be able to find at the cinema. What should I say in this humble review of mine, to give you an honest impression of it? Yes, you have probably already guessed it.