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La velocità della luce (The Speed of Light) |
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| 08/12/2007 |
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Today marked the day of the Italian film in competition: La velocità della luce (literally, “The Speed of Light”) by Andrea Papini. A story with three characters and two cars that chase one another. A story of truth and lies, of hunters and the hunted that swap roles continuously until the epilogue – a point of no return, a limit beyond which one cannot go. In speaking about this limit, Papini, accompanied by actor Peppino Mazzotta and producers Sandro Frezza, Sergio Bernardi and Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani, explained that, “we struggled over the title for weeks before making a decision. A film’s title has to be captivating, it has be striking, but it also has to capture the sense of the film. In the end, we opted for La velocità della luce because in a certain sense it indicates a constraint, a limit that none of the characters can exceed.”
A story of hypnosis with Patrick Bauchau in the role of a subtle enchanter, it also features a man and a woman who go from hunters to suddenly finding themselves in a den of a serpent that rises to the commands of a flute.
As Papini writes in his director’s notes, the film is reminiscent of westerns. “My first film experiences were formed around the shoot-outs of Italian B-movie westerns of the 1970s, films that I loved…in which two men challenged each other without knowing why: a younger man, the pupil, and an older man, the master. Every so often, however, amidst the horseback riding and shoot-outs there were always a strange scene, there was one in every film, in which a man and a woman embraced and I didn’t understand why, and above all what it had to with the story. Perhaps the imaginative structure of this small, ambitious film comes from this personal childhood experience.”
The three characters communicate almost as if they were in a session with an analyst. Since the dialogue reigned supreme, Mazzotta points out, “our bodies were relatively erased, so we had to work a lot on our voices and eyes, almost as if it we were in the theatre.”
The accent-free, neutral inflections in the language tell a story that unfolds below the surface. “La velocità della luce,” adds Papini in his notes, “is structured on multiple levels but overall we focused on making the events coherent so as to not disorient spectators who have to identify with an environment they know, such as that of a (seemingly routine) highway trip, with its stops, its rites and its characters who work there every day, to whom we wanted to pay a small tribute. With screenwriter Gualtiero Rosella we thought that this kind of intermittent, modern migration could be a convenient receptacle for a story on certain contemporary anxieties. Our goal was to hypnotize the spectator with a complex work on the lights and the actors’ voices, thus allowing us to convey other, more complex information and themes that were hidden.” |
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