INDIVISIBLE–The Beguiling Italian Fable Opens in the US Theaters
Despite its title, INDIVISIBLE is literally uniting both critics and the public all over the world. It has already won 6 David di Donatello, gotten three 2017 Golden Globes nominations, including best film, and shined at the 73rd Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.
The film presents us with the hard and intense truth of the suburbs of Naples, with the story of two Siamese twins (the stunning debut of Angela and Marianna Fontana), who are gifted with musical talent, but then transformed into a traveling freakshow.
The World of INDIVISIBLE
The fascination of the movie resides in its potent lyricism, which stands at the threshold of neorealism and symbolism. In the tradition of the Itaian neorealism wave, Edoardo De Angelis depicted the harsh maze of mysery that wafts around the two innocent protagonists, with symbolic, evocative images that transcend into a magical realism. The two twins are transformed into an icon of hope, a deity, for the public that seeks and venerates them. The imagery clashes with the human condition of the two girls whose internal journey is the search for their own individuality, a desire for normality and for youth, which is negated by their family who wants to use them for gain.
A sense of inescapable decadence lives thorugh the entire movie where everything seems to be just a an empty simulacrum of what it should be, from the family and the priest's church, to the Neapolitan suburbs where the girls live. A world that has no mercy for their human condition. It's hard to watch the mother of the two spending her time abusing weed and just looking for the next thing to buy, which she purchases with the money that the freak musical duo gains with their performances. It's hard to watch the father obsessed with managing the girls career, which ultimately is his own, spend all of their money gambling. And it's even more brutal to watch the priest use the twins during his liturgical ceremony, making them pass for a divinity, in order to make money out of them. Or the musical producer who promises them a successful career and money to pay for the operation that could divide them, but, in reality, he is just driven by a morbid sexual attraction to the freaks.
It's a dark constellation of evil presences where the innoncence of the two girls shines through, with their incredible beauty and their evocative vocal talent.
Realism and Symbolism in De Angelis's Imagery
We talked with Edoardo De Angelis about the dichotomy between realism and symbolism: “From an aesthetic point of view, in the eternal debate between realism and magical representation, I try to portray a form of truth. It’s a method that begins with a deep investigation of reality but that doesn’t always accept the representational limits of realism. Sometimes, in order to tell a truth, the image needs to be reformed and made symbolic, it needs to become poetry.”
In Indivisible, archaic symbols and contemporary representations coexist in the attempt to grasp the true nature of a situation that is never only contemporary. “If you follow contemporaneity, you risk showing the world in a way that immediately gets old,” De Angelis told us, “The moment in which I’m telling you something that’s extremely contemporary. In a newspaper, that page will be old the day after. The copresence of old, modern, and futuristic elements is functional. If you’re able to include the past with the present and the future in a single frame, you offer a more honest form to a true representation. Life is nestled in the precarious balance between present and future.”
A Fascinating Soundtrack
In this balance between realism and imagination, the musical comment from Enzo Avitabile, another key player in the story, also has a hand. “We decided to work with Enzo Avitabile on two fundamental elements. Percussion, which represents the terrestrial element, and the horns, which represent a more transcendental aspect. The screenplay followed the score, and the score followed the screenplay.”
The American Release
Regarding one trip to the United States, where he presented the movie in the frame of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2017 festival, De Angelis told us, “One of my desires is definitely to see my films distributed in the States. I believe this audience, particularly the one in this historic moment, can be very sensitive to the idea of freakshows."
The Cinema Made in Italy, a program that promotes and distributes Italian films to theaters in the United States, sponsored by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, the Italian Trade Commission, and the Deutchman Company Inc. is making De Angelis's desire a reality by distributing the movie in North American theaters.
The movie will open first in New York on September 15 at the Linconln Plaza Cinema, then in Los Angeles on September 29 at the Laemmle Royal, and will be present at the San Diego Italian Film Festival on October 3rd. Coming soon to a theater near you!
INDIVISIBLE was produced by Attilo De Razza and Pierpaolo Verga–a Tramp Limited and O’Groove production in collaboration with Medusa Film and Mediaset Premium.
For more info check the Cinema Made in Italy website here. >>
Watch the trailer here. >>
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