VENICE 2022 International Film Critics’ Week
Review: Margins
- VENICE 2022: Niccolò Falsetti’s film about three friends who make punk music in the suburbs is fresh and lively enough to also appeal to audiences who aren’t huge fans of the movement
If you think the punk scene is dead, you’re mistaken. You need only browse Wikipedia or google the word “punk” to realise that every single European country - on the Old Continent, at least - has its own punk groups representing the various substyles of the original musical movement born in the 1970s, which is championed by myriads of online fanzines and local music venues stretching from Norway to Erdogan’s Turkey. Margins [+see also:
trailer
interview: Niccolò Falsetti
film profile], directed by Niccolò Falsetti and selected to compete in the 79th Venice Film Festival’s International Film Critics’ Week section, speaks of a suburban form of punk. Written by the director alongside Francesco Turbanti and Tommaso Renzoni, the film was born out Falsetti and Turbanti’s own experience with the punk group PEGS in Grosseto.
And it’s in Grosseto, in the summer of 2008, that the film unfolds. Edoardo (Emanuele Linfatti), Iacopo (Matteo Creatini) and Michele (Francesco Turbanti) are members of a hardcore band. Bassist, Iacopo, is a classical musician who is lending himself to street punk. In September he’ll sit his exams with his teacher Mr Barenboim before setting out on tour. Edoardo, meanwhile, plays guitar and lives with his mother Tiziana (Valentina Carnelutti), who really doesn’t understand him, with his Discharge, Hüsker Dü and Black Flag t-shirts. And the same goes for drummer Michele. Unemployed, penniless and pissed off, they’re marginalised in a city of 80,000 inhabitants as the film’s title ironically and bitterly suggests. The band’s piece de resistance is “Punk è moda (non per noi)” [“Punk is fashion (not for us)”] in which they sing about how they can’t allow newspapers or television programmes “to tell us what punk is, it’s much more than studs, heavy-duty boots and colourful hair, you don’t find it in nightclubs or community centres, it’s not a young people’s thing, it’s not just another flash-in-the-pan trend, and time will be our witness!”
Their big opportunity comes along when they’re offered the chance to open a concert in Bologna for Defense, a famous American hardcore punk band. The concert is subsequently cancelled, so the trio decide the mountain must come to Mohammed: they invite Defense to play in Grosseto. The situation becomes complicated, however, when Iacopo realises he has his exam scheduled for the same day as the event. Michele, meanwhile, has already bought their pricey aeroplane tickets on the credit card belonging to his girlfriend (Silvia D’Amico), who works on a supermarket checkout, and Eduardo has the fight to end all fights with his mother’s (Nicola Rignanese) partner, on whom they’re dependent for a venue and sound. What would real punks do in this out-of-control situation?
Delivered in an intense, fast-paced Tuscan tongue, which might occasionally have benefitted from subtitles, Margins is a modest but genuine, lively, bright and vivacious film made by people who know about punk ideology and subculture, which is also intentionally chaotic (the director belongs to a collective of authors and filmmakers who have made documentaries, short films, viral campaigns, cross-media projects and web series over the years, as well as a hundred-plus examples of branded content and adverts). The concert scenes are brilliantly shot (spoiler: the concert goes ahead, in some form or another), and the group’s mocking of provincial society is the last act of rebellion by a generation (30-40-year-olds) who are still trying to “dream big”, even if their Hüsker Dü t-shirts are decidedly outdated. In short, audiences young and old will appreciate the liveliness and spontaneity of this film, regardless of their interest in punk.
Margins is an Italian production by dispàrte and Manetti bros. Film in league with RAI Cinema. International sales are entrusted to Fandango Sales.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 02/09/2022: Venice 2022 - Margini
16 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.
© 2022 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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