10/03/2017 - In the second film by Edoardo Falcone, in Italian theatres with 01 Distribution, a rich heir is convinced that his father has been reincarnated in a young con artist

Elio Germano and Fabio De Luigi in Questione di Karma

“I didn’t believe in reincarnation in my past life, and I still don’t”, Woody Allen once wrote. Fabio De Luigi is a staunch believer in it though, in Questione di Karma [+see also:
trailer
making of
film profile], a comedy by Edoardo Falcone in theatres with 01 Distribution. De Luigi (Tiramisù [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) plays Giacomo, the heir to a dynasty of coloured pencil industrialists who suffered the trauma of seeing his father commit suicide by throwing himself from his study window as a child. Giacomo has come to want to get to know his father over the years; he is educated, uninterested in the family business, a pure and noble soul who reads Bhagavadgītā and watches films by Yasujirô Ozu. It is these very intellectual tendencies of his that lead him to believe his father could have been reincarnated, and his encounter with an elderly French esotericist (in a delightful cameo by Philippe Leroy), who actually just wants to get rid of him, strengthens his convictions. The scholar even gives him a name and a place: Mario Pitagora, Rome. 

Giacomo soon tracks down a man of that name, played by the ever-outstanding Elio Germano, who, after a series of dramatic roles (The Beginners [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], Suburra [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Stefano Sollima
film profile], Brotherhood, a Life with Saint Francis [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), lets himself go here to light comedy. Mario Pitagora is the exact opposite of Giacomo, as is true in any self-respecting buddy movie: brash, hungry for money, a terrible father and a con artist plagued with debt who is pursued by money-lenders. It’s only natural that he would take advantage of the seeming naivety of this rich young man, and play along as the “reincarnated dad”. But you don’t mess with karma, and the characters reap what they sow, with things settling back into shape nicely after the penultimate scene which apes Keyser Keyser Söze in Soliti Sospetti. 

Wildside, which produced the film with RAI Cinema, once again goes for an unexpected pairing here, after Paolo Cortellesi-Antonio Albanese in Mamma o papà [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile](still in theatres) and Marco Giallini-Alessandro Gassmann in Falcone’s debut work, Se Dio vuole [+see also:
trailer
film profile], back in 2015. De Luigi/Germano work even better than their predecessors, breathing life into a bizarre and light form of comedy that raises more smiles than laughs. The first with the crazy understatement that sets it apart, Germano in the unprecedented role of a character clearly inspired by those magnificent goofballs of the heyday of Italian comedy, played by Vittorio Gassman and Albero Sordi. Perhaps, as pointed out by the director and critic Davide Ferrario in an article by the latter, all the malice has inexorably disappeared from comedy, with satire replaced by complacence. But times have changed, perhaps there’s a greater need nowadays to understand the laws of human fate than those of the Universe, in the words of Rudolf Steiner. And Edoardo Falcone manages to gently imbue his film with all the traditional conflict and harmony, in this contrast – above all a financial one – between the two protagonist, in the confused mother (Stefania Sandrelli), the calculating step-father (Eros Pagni), and above all the sister (Isabella Ragonese) who gives up her role as a cold post-bourgeois manager to try to understand her brother’s “spirituality”. 

(Translated from Italian)