As someone who grew up in a slightly volatile Italian family (especially my extended famiglia) where resentments, jealousies and misplaced anger, were always percolating and ready to bubble up and explode at any given gathering especially when liquor was served (and when wasn’t it?), I could totally relate to Edoardo De Angelis’ The Fire Within You (Il fuoco che ti porti dentro).
It’s Christmas time in Milan. Rejoice. !Or run away, fast! This year the family is gathering for quite the lambasting. Most of them, anyway.
The matriarch of this August Osage County-homage is Angela (Vanessa Scalera), a Neapolitan hurricane of a woman decimating everyone in her path. The fire she carries inside her burns deep and she can and will breathe it back onto her loved ones when she feels it’s necessary, which is most of her waking moments. She’s old fashioned and charismatic and she can certainly charm. But she can also scald, wound and destroy.
Her victims, oops I mean family members, include her meekish, failed-writer son Antonio (Lino Musella) who now represents authors, Antonio’s too-kind wife, Benedetta (Elena Radonicich), their dance-happy, teen son Andrea (Samuele Mazza), and their very woke, younger daughter, Valentina (Nicole Malaj) as well as Angela’s put-upon daughter Paola (Ivana Lotito), who committed the sin of marrying a Buddhist. An offscreen daughter, referred frequently as a succola (translated as bitch, whore or cunt depending on how harsh the word is spoken), refused her invitation to the festivities. Lucky gal!
Angela is also not thrilled to be in Milan as she has contempt for the north of Italy, a kind of reverse class prejudice.
Our Anna Magnani-esque mama spends much of her time cooking food that no one wants to eat). When she’s not fussing over her baccala (cod), she’s belittling Antonio and/or Paola for various reasons—mostly for not turning out the way she wanted them to—even going to the extreme of wishing her son had never been born. “You crushed the life out of all of us,” Antonio bellows in an atypical outburst. She does not bother to disagree.
She’s also bent on chopping off the head of a live chicken, oops, I mean capon.
But they’re all still trying to please Angela, who also refers to her grandson as a ricchione (a gay slur for faggot) because he enjoys ballet (and because, he probably is gay, but I mean…) She chastises her granddaughter for being a vegetarian and wanting to save the chicken, oops I mean capon, from being decapitated. Even poor Benedetta is smote, although not as much as the others (which will include the poor Buddhist).
But when Giulio Simonetti (Tommaso Ragno), an important, potential new client of Antonio’s, invites himself into the scary festive fray the fear is Angela will eat him alive as well. It all leads to quite the climax.
I loved every frame of this film and did not want it to end. I also desperately wished we could have met the succula daughter so she could add her mother-grievances to the mix and Angela could annihilate her, too.
The entire cast is to be commended for outstanding work as is De Angelis’s riveting directing style, keeping the viewer constantly on their visual toes trying to follow each character. Knowing some Italian helps with the quick-fire and quite authentic overlapping dialogue.
The crisp and clever script is credited to De Angelis, Francesco Piccolo & Ilaria Macchia.
But the one essential aspect of this cinematic gem that allows it to soar above so many of this year’s Venice Film Fest selections is the absolutely fearless and gutsy performance by Scalera. The actress has no vanity here (she is far younger than she’s playing) and doesn’t give a good cazzo about needing to be liked. She’s a wolf on the hunt and will ravage anyone who gets in her way. Right alongside the Sisters Mara (Bucking Fastard), Scalera delivers the most stunning performance of this year’s Biennale!
The Fire Within You is screening in competition at the Venice Film Festival. Merda, merda, merda (break a leg!)!
