In the fields around Perugia is found the body of a girl dressed in high fashion clothes. It is Rosa Lazar (Angelina Andrei), a fifteen-year-old Moldovan who turns out to be actually still alive. In his new film Illusion, from May 7 in the theatres, Francesca Archibugi gives life to a thriller in Italian sauce, telling a mystery with echoes much larger than it appears.
Illusione – Un mystery all’italiana
Illusion therefore develops as the most classic of the thrillers: the city of Perugia is a Twin Peaks constellated by mysterious characters and the dark past. There is the magistrate Cristina Camponeschi (Jasmine Trinca), a hard and restrained woman who tackles her work with the utmost seriousness, accompanied by psychologist Stefano Mangiaboschi (Michele Riondino), who as a teenager ended up in trouble with justice and now is boated between the work and the three children accompanied by his wife Susanna (Vittoria Puccini) always free of work. Then the vice-questor Pizzirò (Filippo Timi), the “maschio” in charge of the sardonic spirit who thinks he always has all the answers.
The relative idyll of a rainy Umbrian city is shaken by the arrival of a conturban teen who seems to remember nothing of his past. But how did it end from Moldova to Perugia? And who wanted to get rid of her?
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Anatomia del dubbio
The feature film is a real story about a young prostitute left dying in a ditch and Archibugi’s goal, according to the same director, is to give a voice and put one of the many victims of male violence forgotten by society and the press.
Illusion takes its cue from the tradition of Camilleri and Scerbanenco to make more than another microcosm of people and characters that have to deal with their ghosts, studying their mechanisms of reaction to the appearance of a perturbante element that is the finding of Rosa Lazar.
The girl, for her part, is a magnetic character who is not as innocent as she seems, is tormented by a violent past and ends up in trouble who loves her. Its alien but ethereal nature makes it fascinating, of that typical charm of a naive and “foreign” creature that however seems to be out of place in every part of the world, alienated by a probable neurodivergence.
Closed in a reality perhaps as protection from abuse, in his relationship with the psychologist after a reassuring understanding begins to insinuate suspicion, in the manner of Vinterberg, and doubt becomes master. Through fragmented flashbacks, the viewer discovers the stages of Rosa’s journey, from the dream of becoming a model to the arrival in Paris thanks to his lenone cousin who instead of protecting her throws in a losco ride on which he himself loses control.
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Una denuncia sociale che non va a segno
If the inspiration of the screenwriters Francesco Piccolo and Laura Paolucci is the Sicily of Montalbano or the Lombardy of Lamberti the result however is more the Umbria of Don Matteo, not getting out of fact from the television screenplay with so much of commistion with the comedy, sporadic in the “comeic line” of the cameos of Francesca Reggiani or Aurora Quattrocchi, in the shoes of a whole noisy and basnate nun.
The other weak point of the film is that while wishing to return dignity to its protagonist, it actually fails to present Rosa as a character at all times. It is as if somehow we only see the image of her that others have, superficial and empty. There is exoticism, sexualization of the foreign character, characterization of a girl always happy and naive to touch idiocy and unable to form meaningful human relationships. After countless years of fruitful relations with the Balkans, it seems that Italian cinema has not yet been able to give a worthy representation that emerges from the misleading malavita-prostitution-pronunce scheme.
The idea of denouncing the terrible phenomenon of human trafficking to the detriment of very young women is noble, and the film definitely tries to show the child’s naivety of these girls coming from disadvantaged realities that rely on powerful and unjusted men with the promise of having a better future. More topical than ever in the Epstein file period, but only the tip of the iceberg of a corrupt political and economic system that not only concerns the eastern European mafia, but which has echoes between the palaces of Strasbourg and Paris for the benefit of pedophile and vicious MEPs.
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In this representation of the architecture of the systemic human sale it is certainly praiseworthy to put violence out of the screen, but at the same time sometimes the film seems to be afraid to dare with the genre in which he could immerse himself much more to return a more harsh and ruthless condemnation.
Illusion is a wasted opportunity to denounce the huge network of heteropatriarchal power that dominates the world, not dareing to fully draw from the genre thriller and mystery resulting in a first-night fiction representation that does not strike as you would like. The interpretations of Filippo Timi and Vittoria Puccini in particular are diamond tips that offer added value to the characters, although well characterized.
L’articolo Illusion is a thriller who is too afraid to be – The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
