Youtopia

The film features Matilda De Angelis (most will know her as the femme fatale from The Undoing) who plays a young woman that becomes a camgirl for some much needed extra cash, mainly to keep her mother from losing their flat, due to big debt.

Now, you might be saying that we've seen this type of scenario before. But I surely haven't seen another movie where the daughter tries to convince her conservative and reluctant mother to also become a camgirl - and with the mother eventually agreeing.

So then you have a mother and daughter doing the cam thing separately within their own bedrooms, while the wheelchair-bound grandma sits alone in the living room, unaware of the current developments.

Then there's the old pervy pharmacy owner that fancies getting it on with sex workers on the side, which, presumably, his wife chooses to ignore in favour of a 'stable' marriage.

Until their new employee at the pharmacy introduces the old man to the anonymous pleasures of the dark web, which leads to him trawling the net for something new and exciting - which comes in the form of a young girl that puts her virginity up for sale.

When a desperate need to make money to save their house befalls an Italian mother and teenage daughter, they turn to the old solution of selling their bodies. There is also the problem of housing the grandmother who is helpless without their support. Unlike the past solution of prostitution, the two use the Internet to sell their bodies remotely by the use of a webcam. Well acted by the leads, there is little actual exposure to titillate the viewer but the director relies on an attractive cast to tell the story and as it unfolds, their desperation creates a tension that needs to be resolved one way or the other. Kept me watching and the photography is excellent.

Director Berardo Carboni stages a small title which, although not entirely successful, offers interesting insights and several moments highlighted by the intriguing camera movements that illustrate in a direct and uncensored way the pain felt by all the characters, who literally and metaphorically undress in front of the screen in an exemplary way, starting with the young Matilda De Angelis who demonstrates all the frankness that hides the fragility with which she voluntarily lends herself to satisfy the fantasies of the users, and the relationship with the increasingly desperate Laura portrayed very well by Donatella Finocchiaro, while Alessandro Haber shows all the depravity mixed with pure dissatisfaction of a man destroyed by the apparent emptiness that struck him in his relationship with loved ones and in a life where all the most precious moments are senseless.

All the characters seek in the body, their own and that of others, an escape route, a solution to their problems of various kinds which, however, is not found as their the spirit is further buried depriving them of real fulfillment, trying to recover what has been lost with shortcuts that move away from reality, unable to build real relationships and imprisoned in the web searching an ephemeral consolation devoid of any solid concreteness, thus losing those few grams of human awareness, lowering with the growing risk of never getting up again.

No spoiler review: If the prospects out there are bleak and you are struggling to feed your family and keep the roof over your heads when the mortgage payments are due what does one do?

The central character is an 18 year old with a mother who is about to lose the very home they are living in with her old senile grandmother.

The story focuses on how seemingly are separate families. The three generations of women In their apartment living off the grandmother's pension and that of a wealthy pharmacist and his staff and family.

The mother and daughter exhibit themselves on pornographic chat room websites in order to make some money but are Still failing to make ends meet. The mother's failure to cope, her dependency on her daughter to assist and her willingness to let her degrade herself in order to earn some money make her a pretty reprehensible excuse for a parent.

Then to match that against the life of the pharmacist a wealthy well educated man but someone who is not also so perfect as he hides his creepy secrets from his family.

One suspects that the two sets of lives would in some way meet.

In addition there is a further subplot where the young girl befriends another person presumably male in a virtual reality game two avatars meeting neither knowing what the other looks like but attracted to one another nevertheless. One creates a world in which the young girl can live a place far more promising than the reality in which she lives.

In an act of total desperation the daughter sees that the only way out for them is to sell her body and the loss of her virginity to the highest bidder in a time limited auction.

Whilst the film itself is not pornographic it's content is a disturbing Statement about the brutality of men and objectification of women.

One can only think that this film is going to have a regrettable ending.

Youtopia is a catchy title, as is Matilde de Angelis. The result of the feature film, however, is ambivalent. On the one hand there is a strong Italian characterisation, the slowness, the interpretation of the characters; on the other hand there is the message: Youtopia is about those things that are not said but are there.

The film, recognised as being of cultural interest with a contribution from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, plunges us at first into a dark seabed, only to re-emerge in the silence of two fishermen, father and son.

Then a series of scenes follow: a woman exercises at home in front of a motivational video.

Remember Cinderella? We took her to Eurodisney!, the fisherman father - Alessandro Haber - upon finding the toy begins to brood thoughts that we do not understand, that his son does not understand either.

The woman, Laura - Donatella Finocchiaro -, talks to her coach, but to no avail. A provocative girl dances as she undresses a little, winking at no one knows to whom.

The setting is all Roman. Perverse games take place accompanied by classical music, in the shadow of a seemingly perfect, if not wealthy, family. In parallel, we are shown another family unit consisting of a grandmother, mother and daughter. They sell their car and look for work, in financial straits they have to pay the mortgage on their house that has been foreclosed.

Suddenly there is another backdrop, which sounds like the real one, but virtual. Animated by strange creatures to be killed with the complicity of another player, unknown in reality, but very close in acquaintance. During the game session, one communicates in another language, English, which emphasises the detachment of the virtual world from the Roman provinciality.

The motivational DVD is thrown in the bin, like so many things in metaphor. The generational difference is blatant and real.

In front of the product by Bernardo Carboni and Valerio Palusci, one can overlook the not always perfect interpretation, in front of a very well-done photography and simple, but profound and never banal dialogues.

The poetic juxtapositions of images and words give the feature film a non-negligible depth, especially for the topics it deals with, which should not leave us indifferent.

Looking for and being able to recognise who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and making it last, and giving it space. The quotation to Calvino is textual and strong in the middle of the short film.

It is not very evident, but there is in the feature film a change in the format of the video between reality and virtual reality, which also becomes the format of the last scenes, with a precise meaning linked to the ending.

Culture is the red thread of the film: La traviata, Italo Calvino, Monet. Everywhere art is disseminated, salvific art, mirror art of the world of all time.

What is Cinderella, if not the symbol of our innermost dream of what we would like to be or have?