Signorina Effe, Riparo, Gli arcangeli

Signorina Effe posterSo, what’s new in the Italian cinemas this week… well, not much, to be honest.

Wilma Labate’s Signorina Effe has been doing reasonable if unspectacular business. This is a kind of social realism movie, set in the late 70s and about a young woman (Valeria Solarino) who goes to work at FIAT in order to support her family, just at the time when union clashes are reaching a pinnacle. She soon becomes involved with both a management lacky (Fabrizio Gifuni, who was also in Hannibal) and a shabby revolutionary (Filippo Timi). Mark it down as a kind of Turinese take on Ken Loach.

Marco Puccioni’s Riparo has been garnering some attention, mainly because of it’s socially relevant storyline, but the audiences have hardly been flocking. It’s the story of a lesbian couple who return from a holiday in Tunisia with an unwanted cargo… an illegal immigrant called Anis, who’s hiding in their car. Before long he’s living with them, trying to come to terms with their relationship and fitting nicely into a bizarre kind of family unit. But things can’t last. Wow, how right on can you get; expect it to hit the festivals any time soon. Maria de Medeiros, Bruce Willis’s phenomenally irritating girlfriend in Pulp Fiction, is the star.

Gli arcangeli is an arthouse movie which has only made it to one cinema. It’s all about a couple who experience a religious trauma when their child makes a bizarre gesture during it’s baptism, not helped much by the priest, who believes that it marks the boy out as having some kind of unique, spiritual improtance, and could possibly even be Christ reborn. This one sounds curious, I wonder if it will ever make it into the international markets?

Bastardi, which looks like being ambrosia to Italo-cult cinema, has also just opened over there, but I’ll tackle that next week once the box office details come in…

About Matt Blake 890 Articles
The WildEye is a blog dedicated to the wild world of Italian cinema (and, ok, sometimes I digress into discussing films from other countries as well). Peplums, comedies, dramas, spaghetti westerns... they're all covered here.

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