Reality

Mostra la reality non il reality. Hahahhahahahhahahshhahahsh

Reality is a fitting title about a man who totally lost it (his own sense of reality).

Part satire, part a comic-tragic portrait of our world with its vanities our hero is just an everyday guy who is a fishmonger, and like many others has a souse, children with all that goes with it.

His world is shaken when following a brief performance in a wedding reception he becomes acquainted with a celebrity and the desire is born in him that he can be part of this world, the world of stardom, wealth and recognition.

So by making use of this brief acquaintance he enters a competition to join big brother and does so in the certainty it will be his passport to fame and fortune. The contact with fame though ludicrously brief it is enough to cause him a great deal of harm.

The harm came in the form of obsessive behaviour, paranoia and hallucination causing a loss of his own self awareness and disregard for all those around him.

A charmer of a movie about vanity, obsession and a surrounding culture that feeds us these kind of fake feelings and desires.

When I started watching this movie I thought "Well, the director is Garrone and the movie is set in Naples, so it must be a copy of Gomorrah or something like that". Instead I was surprised of how Garrone nicely brought up another aspect of Naples and its inhabitants. The setting is a poor neighborhood in the Italian port city and the main character is Luciano, a fishmonger and father of two children. His daily life is ordinary and uneventful and he struggles to earn money through his first job and his second one which consists in cheating people by selling them some cleaning devices. Everything could change when he has the opportunity to participate to the Big Brother rehearsals where he can exploit his qualities as entertainer. His certainty of making it to the show is so strong that he becomes paranoid about people of the Big Brother casting staff spying on him to see if he's really a character as he claims to be in everyday life. He does many crazy things like selling his fishmonger activity and doling out his personal belongings to poor people in order to impress the alleged casting personnel following him. His mental condition soon worsens and develops into craziness which of course affects inevitably his family life. What I liked best about this movie is how Garrone underlines how miserable everyday life can be and how everyone is in search of the big opportunity to get out of misery. This however can lead to ruining personal and family life. I also appreciated how the director shows how some feelings and actions can be so evidently false as that of Luciano of being overly generous with poor people only for personal purposes. One last thing I would like to mark is Garrone's style of shooting, which was quite like that of Gomorrah, that's very simple and with seemingly amateur close shootings. Compared to Gomorrah however I would say that he wanted to give a more dreamy touch and also something Fellinesque: in one scene Luciano comes back home from the Big Brother rehearsal in Rome and, in the beautifully lit neighborhood, he's welcomed by his neighbors as a hero. In the next scene the neighborhood is showed in daytime during its normal daily activity, presenting all its simplicity and misery. Therefore an evident contrast is shown between dream and reality.

I learned of Matteo Garrone from his 2015 movie "Tale of Tales", an unusual spin on fairy tales. It turned out that he had earlier directed 2012's "Reality". The movie is part focus on Italy's working-class population, part indictment of reality TV's exploitation of "real people". The plot involves a fishmonger who gets chosen for a role on a reality show.

I should note that if you're only used to stereotypical Hollywood movies, then you'll want to avoid this one like the coronavirus. Much of the movie consists of long takes, focusing very much on the dialog. A good thing, if you ask me. I would like to see more movies about people and the modern world's impact on them.

I don't know if I would go so far as to call the movie a masterpiece, but it shows the Italy that exists beyond the fashion shows, bike races, etc. Worth seeing.

Garrone's magical movie opens with bows to two great scenes of Italian cinema: the ornate wedding carriage recalls the child's funeral procession from The Gold of Naples, and the helicopter-borne star of a reality show replays the helicopter ride of Jesus in La Dolce Vita. These images evoke Italy as the longest-running "society of the spectacle": Roman games; Renaissance princes and popes who conned everyone, as Machiavelli says; the splendors of the Counter-Reformation Church; and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi with the sun in his pocket-"il sole in tasca." Luciano--fish monger, petty con artist, and pater familias--longs to be cast in a reality show called Big Brother. His quest becomes increasingly obsessive and fantasmagoric, and his extended family shifts from humorous support to escalating concern. Will his dream come true? Aniello Arena in the part of Luciano is terrific and will capture your heart; he has a surprising and poignant story of his own, which you can check online for yourselves. Garrone is a master of production design, creating exuberant post-modern sets in which decaying Neapolitan palazzi mingle with malls and water slides. This movie is perhaps not for everyone-only for those prepared to enter a world that is theatrical, flamboyant, sentimental, and ironic--one that calls for a sense of humor and a big heart.