Faenza at the Rome FF: "My James as a forerunner of the Indignant"
It is a solitary and sensitive young man, non-conformist and therefore considered a social misfit, who plays the main character in Roberto Faenza’s new film, Someday this Pain Will be Useful to You [+see also:
trailer
film profile], based on the successful book by US’ Peter Cameron and presented yesterday at the Rome Film Festival out-of-competition. A young modern-day Holden, "a forerunner of the Indigant" is the director’s definition. James, delicately played by Young British actor Toby Regbo (Mr. Nobody [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jaco Van Dormael
interview: Jaco Van Dormael
film profile]), is a seventeen-year-old boy from New York who finds it hard to conform to a presumed normality: he loves to read, to spend his days in the country with his grandma, he doesn’t want to go to university in order to keep his mind free, he dreams of becoming a shoemaker rather than getting rich in Wall Street at others’ expense.
His awkward attempts at fitting in lead him to take some wrong turns, like entering a chatroom for lonely hearts and suggesting a blind date to the (gay) director of the gallery in which he works, an innocuous act which is interpreted badly and will lead to his being fired. James is therefore sent to therapy by a life coach, who psychoanalyses his young patient while jogging in Central Park. Surrounded by a an eccentric family, the boy finally starts searching within himself and accepting his own otherness, and ends up asking himself a question: "If I’m a misfit, what is everyone else?".
''James is outside the norm, a boy who doesn’t want to be chloroformed, plagiarised, become like everybody else, a very normal teenager in search of his identity'', Faenza observes. "In this respect he is really representative of the times, he stands for a future to be reinvented, in a world which is stuck in the past and which goes round in circles. There is a mass of innocent people who do not want to perpetúate this disaster and is rightly indignant, and I am with them''.
Someday this Pain Will be Useful to You is shot entirely in New York with an American cast, but is for the rest completely Italian: photography (Maurizio Calvesi), editing (Massimo Fiocchi), set (Tommaso Ortino), music (Andrea Guerra) and the soundtrack sung by Elisa. The producers are Elda Ferri, costume designer and Oscar winner Milena Canonero and Ron Stein, in collaboration with RaiCinema. The film will be released in Italian cinemas on February 24, 2012 by 01, at the same time as the release in the US.
(Translated from Italian)
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