Dreaming by Numbers

One woman plays the birthdays of her dead children. Another woman plays numbers passed down from her mother and her mother before her: we see a wooden box stuffed with curling wedding photos and mementos mori, including ancient hand-written lottery tickets. A wealthy intellectual says "Through the poor I learned about the lottery. The lottery is not an innocent game. The lottery has a system and ambition: to interpret the world." He makes several claims about Pythagoras and Kabbala and the antiquity of Naples' civilization. The black & white cinematography does* create a timeless quality, such that I am all but blind to shiny new cars in the background as this ancient numerology articulates itself. But many film-goers may find it easier to view Italian poverty and Italian eccentrics in these shades, creating a sort of nostalgia for more artfully shot fictions. I can see people getting frustrated with the interludes, full of establishing shots providing a deep sense of the Neapolitan funk. Our intellectual tells us that Naples is steeped in pain and deprivation, and these superstitions provide a comfort more visceral than bourgeois savings accounts can provide.

There are overtones of the confessional as people step up to the glass and translate events or hopes into numbers they wish to play that week. The images of dreams are translated into numbers. Dreamers are frustrated when an image is too surreal to translate smoothly, and the ticket vendors try to elicit the dream-emotions an image evoked: anything to find a meaningful reference to a number they can sell you. A mammoth transsexual runs a bawdy bingo/keno parlor calling out numbers and creative translations of the associated imagery: "78: Good news, my husband has died! 38: I do a striptease. 21: I am incredibly feminine!" There is the theological question of playing numbers derived from tragedies and disasters. There is an abiding faith that if you can recognize the serendipity of a lucky number when it appears on a license plate (be it in a newspaper photo or a delivery van that all but runs you down), or select the relevant items from your dreams or biography, you can change your fate. With no future and nothing desirable in your past, you live in the present. A sacred ceremony rescues one believer every week.

This is the best out of 15 films I saw at the Portland International Film Festival, despite a somewhat shoddy visual presentation (some insert shots are striking, but much of it looks like some kind of cross between video and 8mm). The documentary concerns the lottery system in the poorer section of Naples. Many residents, if not most, rely on an old, strange system of numerology to play it. They tell the clerks at the lottery office about a dream they had, for instance, and the main components of the dream are translated into numbers using a seemingly ancient book called "The Grimace" (why it is called this, along with a few other things, is never explained), or its more modern equivalents. It answers the eternal question: why do poor people throw their money away on the lottery, when they least of all can afford to? The answer in Naples is it is not just a token of hope, but a social activity, a way of parsing the events of their lives for sense and meaning, and simply a way of making life a game. Its at times strikingly strange (a drag queen running bingo games out of her apartment for buttoned-down little old Italian women would be an unforgivably contrived conceit in a fiction film, but one of the highlights of this one), surprisingly moving, often just surprising, and all around delightful. The fact that there are no other comments makes me worry for this film's fate--it has broad appeal. A genuinely heart-warming film, and I normally avoid those like the plague.