Aspettando Il Sole (Waiting for the Sun)

Ago Panini

Italy

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Synopsis

The place is Italy, sometime at the beginning of the Eighties. Three bad boys stumble across a remote hotel, looking for something to amuse them through the long hours until dawn.  They decide to take the hotel’s night porter hostage. The Bellevue Hotel is full of guests who breathe and sob behind doors. They act out of love and despair, in whispers and screams. Only when these stories start to intertwine do the walls dissolve revealing the visible thread that links their destinies.

REVIEW

Termites thrive by devouring the house that sustains them.  When it all comes crashing down around them, they survive in the interstices and move on to the next structure they'll devour.

A termite colony provides the metaphor-within-the-metaphor for this highly metaphorical and entirely funny indictment of contemporary Italy, where all is inauthentic and where no structure can survive the incessant little sawdust-producing gnawings of whomever you take the termites to represent (I say the ruling neo-fascist politicians-and you thought Mussolini was dead?).

The metaphor it's within is a hotel, aptly named "Bellevue" (in French, that is, and hence pretentious, fake, foreign, as if "Bella Vista" wouldn't do).  To the Bellevue comes a group of bored young hooligans out looking for cigarettes or whores, whichever they can find first.  Finding neither, they toy with the uptight receptionist (whose Venetian accent provides Italian-speakers with yet another level of parody), a rule-obsessed functionary impressed with his own authority but not as simple as he might at first seem.  He owns a termite colony, which he keeps under a protective cloth right on the counter. (Big mistake.)

If Fellini and his protégé Wertmuller use the brothel as metaphor for the Italian nation, Panini is renewing their tradition with the "Bellevue" hotel.  Its guests during an agricultural association convention include an Italian trying to be a German (Nazi nostalgia?), a phone-obsessed drama king whose woman is betraying him, a masochist prostitute and a sushi expert (Don't ask!  Really don't ask!), and a porno film crew.  Can you guess which of these provides the unexpected setting for a glimmer of authentic affection?

Democratic traditions in France may be rooted deeply enough to sustain that nation-state past its own crises of prejudice during the demographic innovations post-colonialism entails.  I hope they are, so that France will not turn en masse to politicians of racial hatred like Le Pen.  And perhaps Germany, because it had the guts to put itself through the grueling process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and take responsibility for its Nazi past, may somehow move toward reconciliation within its own new demographics.  But I can only hope that Italy will wake up in shock-shock caused by this movie-to realize that its own populist tendencies have lead it into grave danger of repeating the ventennio nero of fascist rule.  Never mind that the left's failures encouraged a turn to the right.  To the far, far right.  The abyss of fascism is still gaping.

So Rome's mayoral candidate gives the fascist salute during a campaign rally.  Anyone here notice that?  He won the election.  So a Member of the Italian Parliament, when asked on internationally broadcast Italian TV why he'd helped to vote in a law requiring that all Romi, citizens or not, be fingerprinted, said "Because they're all thieves."  Anyone here notice that?  Italy's grimy with sawdust these days.  Bravo, Panini, for sounding the warning people might actually hear!  And letting us have a good laugh or two while we're hearing it!

-Beverly Allen