29/03/2010

If no man is an island, as John Donne’s poem teaches us, men who live on islands have their particularity, be it an obscure impulse for extinction or a sunny disposition for solitude.

Salvatore (Dario Castiglio) is a good-looking 20-year-old who takes tourists on daytrips around his Sicilian island, Ventonene, in his little boat. In the winter he begrudgingly works construction on “terra ferma”, under the table and in dangerous conditions. But then summer returns, and the tourists along with it, beautiful and often available.

One day he meets Martina (Martina Codecasa), who’s come from Genoa to scuba dive in the Tyrrhenian Sea. She hides a troubled inner life, a painful past and unresolved emotions. Salvatore and Martina spend an intense night together before she leaves for home the next day, and disappears from his life. Salvatore literally gets (love)sick. He no longer remembers how to walk. He tells the psychologist he’s sent to see: "Maybe I just want to start over, as if I were a child".

After his "all star" experiment Commediasexi [+see also:
trailer
film profile] in 2006, Alessandro D'Alatri has made a small romantic story. Sul Mare [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“On the Sea”) was produced by the fledgling company Buddy Gang – founded by the director with Alessio Gramazio and Bernardo Barilli – and Warner Bros Italia, which will distribute it on 250 screens on April 2.

D’Alatri’s seventh film is adapted from the novel In Bilico Sul Mare by Anna Pavignano, renowned for having co-written with Massimo Troisi all of his films (including Il Postino, for which they received a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination). Pavignano also adapted Sul Mare with D'Alatri.

"I wanted to make a kind of second debut, to get a breath of fresh air, to get back in the game,” said D'Alatri after the film’s press screening. Which is why he chose two young, unknown actors and high technology on a low budget. "This is the most expensive film of my career, not in terms of money but in terms of enthusiasm and passion. We shot with five different digital cameras, and had a very experimental post-production process that lasted four months. This is a 35mm film made with €8,000 cameras".

"Salvatore is a pretext for depicting an innocence that Italians have lost,” added the director, who has always maintained a certain political element in his films. "Blending entertainment and social content is part of the DNA of the films I’ve made and which have influenced me".

However, given his choice to use unknown actors, D'Alatri could have lingered less over the somewhat adolescent sentimentalism that languishes in the second half of the film (which takes away from the visual charm of the undeniable beauty of the landscape), to enter more into the essence of the two main characters.

Having just returned from a long “tour” that took him to many film schools and universities, D’Alatri says he’s now very busy discussing the film on Facebook, "a fantastic tool that brings films back into contact with audiences. Who knows, maybe my next film will take shape from there".

(Translated from Italian)