Is Italian cinema starting again from the provinces?

The provinces are not just a geographical place but an inner condition. They are at once a sense of belonging and a feeling of guilt: something you protect and, at the same time, tend to hide, somehow trying to make up for it or get past it. They have always been an inexhaustible source of stories, on and off the big screen, which Italian cinema has drawn on constantly. Think of the work of directors such as Cesare Zavattini, Antonioni, Fellini, Bertolucci, Bellocchio and Rossellini, whose stories are deeply intertwined with those places, both as narrative and as a tool for observing, documenting and denouncing society. In films like these, certain themes keep coming back: the relationship with money and work, human relationships subordinated to appearances and, above all, the urge to escape.

From the postwar period on, this kind of story was gradually lost, absorbed by the almost exclusive centrality of film production first in Rome and then in Milan. Only from the 1990s did an attempt to decentralise the industry take hold, bringing the provinces (and individual regions) back to the heart of the Italian cinematic imagination. A process that has since come to embrace much of the country, thanks also to documentaries and popular cinema. At the same time, in auteur cinema, there has been an increasingly tangible search for local realities seen through a universal lens. In contemporary Italian cinema this search has become especially evident in recent years. In this sense, Francesco Sossai’s Le città di pianura (The Lowland Towns) is the film of the year: a work that not only recovers a provincial story, but also goes back to portraying the working class in the Fellinian tradition, offering a clear-eyed, meaningful portrait of the country today.

In the provinces, people work. Always, without exception. Those who do not find a job straight after their studies are, at best, branded lazy; at worst, not “man” enough. In Fellini’s I vitelloni, none of the characters has a steady job, and this condition, together with their way of being in the world, defines them more than any other trait. Showing them as they wander aimlessly or spend their days sitting in the village bar, Fellini tells much more than simple unemployment: he stages an existential inadequacy, a deep gap between them and what the provinces expect of their adults. Because in these places work is not just a means of support, but an almost indispensable rite of passage to be recognised as an adult.

Le città di pianura fits into this tradition as a road movie rooted in that cinema of the past. The film tells the effects of the 2008 crisis through Carlo (Sergio Romano) and Dori (Pierpaolo Capovilla), two disillusioned men who burst into the life of the young co-protagonist, the student Giulio (Filippo Scotti), bringing with them the weight of a failure that is personal but also collective.

The two protagonists cross a Veneto of half-empty bars, chasing one last beer. What the film gives us is an Italy made of small, anonymous, desolate towns. On the narrative level, the transformation the characters of Le città di pianura go through is as concrete as the towns marked on the maps they consult along the way: maps that end up reflecting their melancholy inner lives too. The journey thus becomes the exploration of a microcosm that no longer exists and that, perhaps, is destined to disappear everywhere, not just in this region. It is a dense journey that recovers the complexity of commedia all’italiana, populated by unlikely, implausible figures.

The obsession with one for the road is only a pretext. The itinerary, from Venice to the Brion tomb and the memory of Carlo Scarpa, also becomes a journey into the imaginary, where rich city folk arrive by helicopter, flash a Rolex and vanish to become urban legends, even in the provinces. Their presence, however, hangs over the whole film among the “for sale” signs, the barred windows, the closed bars, the cocaine, the cocktails, the alcohol-free beers drunk at night at motorway stops: what emerges is a landscape where land becomes territory and territory empties out. You are left with the impression that only the infrastructure built for constant movement will survive, with no real places left to reach.

Le città di pianura observes its characters and their lives without judging or pitying them: in this gaze we begin to see the sign of an Italian cinema that is once again approaching the provinces with delicacy. And delicacy is needed, because this Italy is the country of “provincials”, a word that still carries a sense of inferiority and narrowness, even though very often these are people who have seen more of the world than the very cities that judge them. They are people used to successive forms of colonisation: first cultural, then physical, finally economic, all the way to gentrification.

To tell the provinces on screen today means telling a complex, fragile country going through a deep crisis that the more popular stories and the cuts to culture try to hide. But the enthusiasm - sometimes polemical, sometimes seductive - for these places rehabilitated by cinema conceals these and other more restless, problematic reflections, able to question what remains on the margins.