13/11/2012 - Four years after Il seme della discordia, the Neapolitan director returns with a comedy on plastic surgery starring Laura Chiatti and Alessandro Preziosi, in competition in Rome

The film starts with what seems like a ghost dance in an enchanted garden. If you look closely though, the scene becomes reminiscent of La notte dei morti viventi. Il volto di un'altra [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Pappi Corsicato, the second Italian film in competition during this year’s Rome International Film Festival (9-17 November), comes to life immediately. People bound up from head to toe walk around in the Belle Vie beauty clinic: patients reduced to this state by plastic surgery operations. Some have a bandaged nose, others have their breasts tied up in post-operation bandages, and others still have bruised eyelids. They look like mummies. These grotesque, gyrating figures, both men and women, can be found in the hospital’s corridors, numbly happy to have been retouched.

The macabre backdrop helps Corsicato give his audience a powerful image. What follows, centred around these martyrs of perfection, is an ironic comedy on superficial looks, plastic surgery, and sensationalist news cycles, full of references and citations (Almodóvar, Coen brothers, Billy Wilder, to name just a few) and surreal photography (by Italo Petriccione, a Gabriele Salvatores co-worker). In all of this, something is wrong.

Bella (Laura Chiatti) is the attractive anchor for a television show on plastic surgery, in which her husband (Alessandro Preziosi) operates on patients live. She loses her job after the public tires of seeing her face. On her way home, she is caught in an accident which leaves her disfigured. Bella decides to have her husband give her a new face in order to re-conquer her audience. People get excited about this piece of news and media starts camping outside of the clinic where the showgirl is being operated on. The South Tirol clinic acts as a place where paradoxical situations and people abound, including a nun obsessed with purges (Iaia Forte, one of Corsicato’s fetish actresses) and a maintenance man with foolish and revolutionary aspirations (Lino Guanciale, also starring in a festival film by Nicchiarelli).

Corsicato is both irreverent and visionary. One question remains though: why is such a devilish couple played by such young and beautiful actors? “I wrote the screenplay with an older woman in mind,” the director revealed, “and then I thought a young and beautiful woman who wants to change her physique would be more amusing. Alessandro Preziosi is the perfect doctor: I wanted him to be even more beautiful than his patients.” Beautiful or not, a set of more expressive protagonists with a few more nuances would have been good for the film. If something is missing in Corsicato’s film, it is precisely that.

Produced by Tilde Corsi and Gianni Romoli in collaboration with Rai Cinema, Il volto di un'altra will be coming out in February 2013, distributed by Officine UBU.

(Translated from Italian)