VENICE 2007 Out of competition "Maestri"
A portrait of a hotel as a prison, by Lizzani
Eleven years after Celluloid, Carlo Lizzani is back on the silver screen with Hotel Meina, adapted from the book of the same name inspired to Marco Nozza by a tragic episode of the nazi-fascist era : the execution of sixteen Jewish prisoners in a hotel, after which they were dumped into the Lake Maggiore.
This title, screening in the "Venezia Maestri" section, does not betray the ambition its director has had his whole career, for he has been dedicating himself for over half a century to telling the History of Italy and reconstructing it through images – a vocation not unlike Roberto Rossellini's, and indeed, the didactic aspects of Lizzani's entry are reminding of the work of the creator of Paisan.
Hotel Meinai, which strikes a still untouched nerve of our recent past, has had a chaotic time : Pasquale Squitieri was fired by producer Ida Di Benedetto, and then came the statements of Becky Behar (last survivor from the 1943 slaughter) against a script which takes certain liberties with the description of the hotel/prison and invents characters and love stories that never happened – such as 18-year-old Noa Benar (inspired by Behar herself, although she was only 13 at the time) and young Julien Fendez' (played by Federico Costantini).
For whoever lived through those tragic events, any betrayal of the truth can be difficult to forgive, but that is not why the film is not fully convincing – not that Lizzani lacks experience, but that with time, History is harder and harder to tell. Years ago, Lizzani managed to read (and interpret) the tensions of that era, but as the gap widens between those events and today, time freezes the psychological insight (and credibility) of Lizzani's work: the dialogues weigh like pompous moralizing and the characters speak like printed books.
Hotel Meina, produced in Italy by Titania Produzioni, in coproduction with Plaza Film (France) and Film 87 (Serbia), will be distributed in Italy between the end of the year and the beginning of 2008 by Mikado. Sales are handled by Rai Trade.
(Translated from Italian)
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