08/10/2009

No film by Renzo Martinelli can escape controversy, preventative or otherwise. This time, journalists have even pointed out the political colour of the operation – “Padania green”, the colour of the film’s official sponsor, the right-wing, separatist Lega Nord party, whose leader Umberto Bossi even appears as a Lombardy nobleman. But the director has done nothing to dispel it, and perhaps has even sought it out.

A low profile certainly does not befit Martinelli: he enters the media frenzy a bit like his Alberto da Giussano, who openly challenges Barbarossa [+see also:
trailer
film profile] [12th century emperor Frederick Barbarossa]. The two main characters of the film, set in the 12th century, are a humble blacksmith from Milan (played by Raz Degan), and the sovereign who dreamed of re-unifying the empire.

The film’s epic ambitions (unusual for Italian cinema, which, according to Martinelli, “has always shown a natural reluctance towards the genre”) deserve much more, as well as less abuse of digital effects. For instance, the “crowd replication” of which the director is so proud – used to replicate extras recruited in Romania (who’s going to tell the notoriously anti-Romanian Lega Nord?) – doesn’t work well when the walls of Milan, meant to be solid and impregnable, seem, and perhaps are, made of plasterboard.

Barbarossa is said to have cost $30m, and this time the usually staunchly self-financing Martinelli even asked some funding from the Ministry of Culture. Yet despite the budget, the blockbuster gives the impression of having been downsized in everything but the running time (a version ever longer than the current 140-minute cut will air on TV); of being poor rather than opulent (in set design, costumes, sieges and field battles). Which not even the cast – stellar on paper, with the costliest being Rutger Hauer as Barbarossa, and F. Murray Abraham as Siniscalco Barozzi – can save from involuntary mocking effects.

(Translated from Italian)