A Neapolitan fishmonger gets a call back from the Italian version of the Reality TV show “Big Brother,” and it is enough to uproot his connection to, um, reality. Wordplay aside, Matteo Garrone’s film is an exasperating, astute, and befuddling contemporary parable that weaves the desperate story of a pitiful everyman into a rumination on life, dreams, media, aspiration, and even the nature of religious conviction.
Garrone is one of my favorite Italian directors working today, in part because he excels in a kind vernacular cinema, one that is thick with its regional sense of place. Reality is a particularly Italian film in the way it sets its critical sights on a national infatuation with status, wealth and prestige (some of the reasons why the successful playboy Silvio Berlusconi was reelected so many times). The film’s opening sequence is particularly strong, with Garrone’s camera gliding through a wedding scene. Perhaps the director is poking fun at The Godfather, the way cinema creates negative ideals (the Italian success story as criminal underworld), but it doesn’t take long for us to realize that this bourgeois wedding scene has been turned on its head, transforming it, through a subtle shift of perspective, from a vision of regal grandeur to crass contemporary kitsch. It’s part in parcel with the way Garrone sees the world, a place of deception, manipulated by forces both exterior and interior to ourselves.
