Title: Freaks Out
Director: Gabriele Mainetti
Language: Italian, German, French
Running time: 141'
We’d be lying to ourselves if we were to think that Italian cinema hasn’t lost its grandeur in the latest years. Italian cinema could never compare to Hollywood productions, but has been working towards gaining again some of that respectability that had put the country on the map of cinema in the previous century. The aim of Mainetti’s Freaks Out seems to be just that: to make an Italian production that might, at least from afar, somewhat resemble a Hollywood colossal, with special effects and some funny puns.
It’s 1943 and Rome has just been occupied by the Nazis. Our protagonists are four circus freaks with superpowers: Fulvio (Claudio Santamaria) is a hairy wolf-man with super strength, Mario (Giancarlo Martini) is a literally magnetic dwarf, Cencio (Pietro Castellitto) can control all a the various species of insects, and Matilde (Aurora Giovinazzo) induces electric current with all of her body. They live together in Israel’s (Giorgio Tirabassi) circus, a Jewish man that has become like their father, especially for Matilde. Israel would like for them to escape together to the USA, but when he goes to get the documents to do so, he gets apprehended by the Nazis. When the freaks don’t see him come back, they think he has fled with their money, but Matilde feels there's something more under it. The three men don’t want to believe her and want to join the ZirkusBerlin instead. This circus is managed by the German twelve-fingered pianist Franz (Franz Rogowski), whose real superpower is to travel in time: he knows that Germany will lose the war and knows of the existence of our four freaks, and wants to get them because he thinks they’ll be able to help the Reich. On the other hand, Matilde wants to go get Israel. The three men split from our little girl, who becomes the real protagonist of the movie, in a quest to save the world and learn how to control her superpowers.
There is a lot going on in Freaks Out, with scenes of the war, magic, the Nazis and time traveling. It might be a little too much. The CGI also isn’t always great. We can see that a lot of the inspiration for the characters and their superpowers comes from Marvel Comics and the X-Men, but still there is some originality in Mainetti’s work. Some of it might even seem like a caricature, with some good jokes told in typical Roman dialect. Again, there is a lot going on in this movie, so much that sometimes the characters might feel like they haven’t been studied deeply enough, or that the relationships between them aren’t as deep as the directors wants to make them out to be.
However, it’s in all of this stuff that the movie succeeds. It’s in the combination of all of these elements that Mainetti’s Freaks Out might open the doors to a new type of Italian cinema: one that is overproduced, with a lot of money behind it, the kind of cinema that one might put close to Hollywood productions instead of always making it seem like it’s something totally different, like Italians are capable of making only author cinema. This might be the colossal that Italian cinema needed to get back its cinematic grandeur. It might not be perfect, in fact it isn’t, but it’s a first step towards gaining that respectability that Italian cinema has lost throughout the years.
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