Le città di pianura by Francesco Sossai is a film that seems to speak to anyone who grew up in a place where time does not flow but stagnates. In an Italy that mirrors itself in its tidy countryside and its ever-changing bars, an Italy where youth is not momentum but stasis: a prolonged pause, a fog that swallows up every possible direction.
Carlo Bianchi, Sergio Romano, and Doriano, Pierpaolo Capovilla, are not just two characters, they are two faces, two spots of a country that struggles to recognise itself, that takes refuge in habits, in addictions, in the reassuring mediocrity of immobility. A condition that Sossai turns into a journey, or perhaps it would be better to call it an escape.
Le città di pianura is an upside-down coming-of-age road movie, where the road does not lead elsewhere but takes you back inside, towards the emptiness that everyone tries to fill.
Le città di pianura (lowland cities) are not just a geographical place, they don't really want to be, lowland cities are a condition, as just mentioned. But let us take a step back: for those who have never inhabited them, understanding their stillness is difficult.
The days flow identically, the faces repeat, the evenings resemble each other to the point of blurring. The search for the different is a thin thread that is in danger of breaking, or that in some contexts has never really been woven, and that in that stability wears down to become a tenacious, stubborn, almost working-class restlessness.
The only way out is, often, imagination, or escape, or both. Yet one need only go a little further, towards the big cities, to see the density of the air change. Where supply grows, so does the possibility of choice, of mingling, of breathing, while bearing in mind that this abundance has a limit: saturation. And that at the same time, people from the plains do not like to go to the city.
Carlobianchi and Doriano move within this tension. Their encounter with Giulio, or Luca, depending on the two's degree of drunkenness, played by Filippo Scotti, becomes the spark that rekindles their awareness of their restrained lives. Giulio is the young man 'of the lowlands', polite, composed, with his present ready for the girl he likes. He is the one who stops and does not dare, because the next day 'there is something to do', work, home, duty that always precedes pleasure. He is the son of the North, where work is not just hard work but identity, where the morality of sacrifice is handed down like a hereditary value.
And so, between a graduation party and a return at dawn, between a car ride and one too many drinks, Le città di pianura recounts the deepest contradiction of contemporary living: the desire for freedom that coexists with the fear of losing it.
Sossai constructs a film that does not want to give answers but leaves wounds open. His direction does not seek the aesthetics of movement, but that of stasis, which we constantly find in the descriptive use of the camera. The landscapes of the Veneto become characters, as in post-World War II Italian neo-realism, silences speak louder than words and the horizon of the plain becomes a mirror of the human soul.
It is a film that does not proceed by events but by states of mind, by an accumulation of sensations and pauses, until it draws a map of immobility that belongs to everyone, even those who have never experienced it. And it is there that everything returns: the plain, the suspended youth, the journey that leads nowhere else.
Like the fog that envelops the plain, the film closes in the silence with which it began. But it is not the same silence, it is the one that comes after realising that one cannot escape from what one is.
For a good part of the film, Carlobianchi and the Dorian seem like two Beckettian figures, suspended like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. They are waiting for something, or someone, that can give meaning to their wandering, a higher power, a sign, in this case Genius (speaking name), which however never arrives. And when he finally arrives, he disappoints and quickly fades away, as if his presence were only an illusion of desire, a projection of what they themselves cannot become.
Just as there is something ancient, almost fairytale-like about the way the two protagonists move, reminiscent of The Cat and the Fox teaching Pinocchio disobedience as the only way to knowledge. Here too, rebellion is the first language of life, but it is a rebellion that does not build, it digs.
In the landscape of the Veneto region, and by extension the Po Valley, escape is a mirage, a horizon that repeats itself. The plain becomes a metaphor for an inner Italy, flat, conservative, habitual, but traversed by a desperate need to feel alive.
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Fonte immagine:
https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/le-citta-di-pianura/
Le città di pianura, regia di Francesco Sossai – © Festival de Cannes
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L'Autore
Jacopo Cantoni
Laureato in Cinema presso l'Alma mater Studiorum di Bologna, mi cimento nella scrittura di articoli inerenti a questo bellissimo campo, la Settima Arte. Attualmente frequento il corso Methods and Topics in Arts Management offerto dall'università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.
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Francesco Sossai Le città di pianura Cannes 2025 Un Certain Regard Sergio Romano Pierpaolo Capovilla Filippo Scotti Cinema Italiano Il Gatto e la Volpe Waiting for Godot