Genesis of an artist: Fabelmans leaves its mark Mountains and donkeys, friendships and cruelty

Perhaps it is fate that there is always a train at the beginning. Certainly even the first amazement is never forgotten. It even becomes an obsession. So when Sam Fabelmans, still a child, son of a computer engineer and a failed pianist forced to be a housewife, sees the spectacular accident on the tracks filmed by Cecil B. DeMille in a hall of his city, he is struck by it and at the first opportunity possible has only one desire: to replicate it. After all, isn’t it the “greatest show in the world”? By revealing his childhood and his family, Spielberg also illustrates his greatest passion, passed through the years and the various technical possibilities, starting with his father’s first 8 mm and his first home movies, where his imagination was already galloping; and he does it with that measured sentimentality that permeates everything in life and almost always the gestures of his characters, drawing his own parable as an artist, anything but simple, passed through painful experiences. “The Fabelmans” tells the story of a formidable director’s calling before his dream of becoming one begins in earnest; and, at the end of the film, above all after that extraordinary encounter, affectionately grumpy and a little paternalistic, with an authentic master of all time (John Ford played by David Lynch, who adds his own irony), who explains to him where he should be the horizon in the shot, because if you get it wrong, the cinema dies. Thus the whole beautiful first part is captured in Sam’s feverish desire to learn how to shoot, edit, understand cinema, which reveals, modifies, interprets reality, even in its cruellest form. See the whole reconstruction of the discovery of the mother’s love affair with the “uncle”, where the whole narration passes through the revision of shots during a trip in the woods, which the viewer experiences through the increasingly astonished gaze of the boy, forced to remove from editing the offending frames, while the mother plays Bach on the piano. Spielberg makes the power of the image stand out, therefore of the cinema and even if the second part, from the arrival in California, especially in the school where Sam is the object of anti-Semitism, is not as engaging, “The fabelmans” is the generous act of a director who has decided to entrust the story of his life to cinema. Far from easy, because the film can be tougher than perhaps it seems. The good Paul Dano is a father who always misses something important about his family, the very good Michelle Williams is a mother in constant trouble for balance towards herself and her children (think of the scene of the tornado), but the real surprise is the ‘intense adhesion of Gabriel LaBelle, who doses the young Spielberg the electric moments of the training and the melancholic ones of the hardness of feelings. Score: 8

DO THE DONKEY – The world seen through the eyes of a donkey. Starting from Bresson’s Balthazar, but immediately derailing in a composition for paintings not necessarily in dialogue, with “EO” Skolimowski composes a symphony on freedom (in this case of animals) that is not charming, splendidly captured in its most varied forms, with decidedly surprising breaks at times, but perhaps trivializing itself when it deals with human behavior (the decidedly unhappy ending, with Isabelle Huppert) and insistently accelerating on the animalist manifesto (circuses, cages, etc.), already clear from the first sequence. Perhaps, if anything, the relationship between the donkey and the girl was developing more, strong at the beginning and then a little abandoned. Not without sarcasm (starting with the title, which echoes the bray), shocking in some violent fragments (the killing of the truck driver), the figure of this little donkey remains unforgettable, an extraordinary “actor”, whose close-ups fill the screen and history. Score: 6.

UP THERE IN THE MOUNTAINS – Pietro is a city boy, he lives in Turin and during the holidays with his family he goes to a small village of only 14 inhabitants in the Aosta Alps, where the only one of his age is Bruno. A very strong friendship was soon born between them, which will last a lifetime, albeit with various parentheses of separation. From the novel by Paolo Cognetti, winner of the 2017 Strega prize, “The eight mountains”, an “Italian” film directed by a couple of Belgian directors, is a bucolic elegy of the mountain, a hymn devoted to the purest friendship and existential conflicts with oneself and especially with fathers. Shot in a format that denies the spectacularization of the landscape (therefore a square that also indicates the introspection of the characters), it is a bildungsroman that lacks excessive length, a somewhat cumbersome Asian digression, but which leaves the force intact of a solid and in its own way “sentimental” relationship between two young people who seek, not without difficulty, their own place in the world and their own purpose in life. Supported by the good performance of Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi who return to work together 7 years after “Don’t be bad”, the film suggests the fraternal breath of the mountain. His relationship with man and the desire to raise him to spirituality, between the materiality of farming and dairying and the aspiration to become a writer. A beautiful story of friendship, stronger in the writing than in the images, where perhaps the spark is not triggered. Score: 6.

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Genesis of an artist: Fabelmans leaves its mark Mountains and donkeys, friendships and cruelty