Reality Used To Be a Friend Of Mine

Jenni Eylül 19, 2022

No it's not Jersey Shore - Matteo Garrone's new film Reality

Although it received some indifferent reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Matteo Garrone's new film Reality, can only enhance his reputation as one of the best Italian directors working today. Perhaps the international jury at Cannes didn't quite understand it's national relevance. This is an important film for Italians - taking a long hard look at a society not only in economic but also in cultural crisis. Garrone has been rather disingenuously promoting the film as a "comedy" and although it is certainly lighter than his previous film, Gomorra, a dispiriting albeit visceral examination of the power of the Neapolitan Mafia, any laughs provoked by Reality, stick bitterly in the throat.

The film starts with a bravura aerial shot over Naples, indebted to Fellini, before sweeping us into the garish excess of one of the wedding receptions at what can only be described as a wedding theme park. Your enjoyment of these scenes depends largely on your tolerance of shiny synthetic fibres but it tells a truth about the region where weddings are the one chance for people to be stars of their own big show no matter what their economic means. The film picks up here on one of the guests, Luciano, a local fishmonger and bit of a "character"who will even drag up to drag out a laugh or two from his indulgent family and circle of friends. The wedding package includes a paid appearance from Enzo - the latest winner of Grande Fratello (The Italian Big Brother) - whose obvious contempt for them notwithstanding, is treated as hero - film/football star rolled into one. He runs around to all the receptions, toasting each respective happy couple before flying off in a helicopter.

Luciano's head is turned by this brief encounter with second hand fame and when his children convince him to go to an open audition for the show at a local shopping centre, he is thrilled to get called back to the second round of auditions in Rome. Well played by the charismatic Aniello Arena in his first role, Luciano is a decent family man, not beyond augmenting his income with the odd scam, but clearly a devoted father and husband and a popular figure in the community. However Luciano soon becomes obsessed with being on the show and the chance it offers him to distance himself from the underclass that surrounds him. He sells his business so he can be ready for the call when it comes and then becomes increasingly paranoid - convinced that he is being spied on by T.V. people from Rome to see if he is "worthy" of being on the show. When no one in fact calls, Luciano spirals into depression as he watches the new season start without him. Luciano feels cheated, bemoaning that he deserves to be on T.V. more than the talentless contestants chosen, unaware that he is not young and handsome enough to appeal to the desired demographic.

Garrone shows how celebrity has replaced religion as the opiate of choice for the uneducated underclass. There is an ironic scene in a cemetery where Luciano asks if he will get into the "house" - The Big Brother house not the house of God. Garrone also posits that celebrity, like religion, can be appropriated for entirely selfish purposes. When Luciano starts giving away his family's possessions it is not due to a new found sense of charity but in the hope that this will be a good enough story to get him on the show. The Church is at least shown to instill a sense of community, while the open-ended final scene shows Luciano retreating further into his own fantasy.

Garrone's beautiful film confronts an ugly truth about Italian society. Luciano's willingness to do anything to get on the show and his absorption into fantasy when it is denied him, chimes perfectly with a country lacking a sense of civic responsibility and unwilling to make the sacrifices needed to create a fairer more transparent society. "This I'm all right Jack" attitude can be seen not only in the arrogance of the reality show celebrity, but also in the corruption of the politician spending up large while the country drowns in debt or the greed of the Italian super rich quickly putting their assets into other names or foisting them off shore.

There is a remarkable scene that occurs at the beginning of the film. Luciano's family return to their dilapidated building after the wedding. The palazzo still has a trace of it's former glory, but the extended family live together in overcrowded and sometimes squalid conditions: a disabled uncle is carried up the stairs and then placed in his wheelchair in his room where he is confined for most of the day. The family take off their "good"clothes and get ready for bed and the daily struggle which will begin again the next day. This is the reality for many people in Italy - where the average wage has not risen in 12 years. The media tells these people to "never give up" on their dream of an easy future based on "celebrity", unrelated to hard work or talent, just as Enzo tells Luciano. Shouldn't they be fighting for social justice instead?

Reality - Official Trailer

While Grande Fratello may have had it's day, Italian T.V. still offers a steady diet of reality programming and should you need an example of how loathsome this tide of media brainwashing is, try watching "La seconda casa si scorda mai" (Never Forget Your Second House). Yes that's right your SECOND house. This is one of those property porn reality shows in which rich bastards and tax evaders look for a SECOND house with the help of an architect (who inevitably shows them something over budget and inappropriate to their needs) and an estate agent (whose ingratiating demeanour barely disguises her ruthlessness) Nominally it is a competition between the two of them: We are introduced to a super smug couple or family who NEED a second property - preferably by the sea or in the middle of Venice and then the architect and estate agent select two properties each for them to view. The architect almost never wins as he continually selects homes that (a) he likes or (b) he's designed with the nonchalance of someone who has never had to work for a living. The estate agent though, with her forced laughter and shark like dead eyes, is clearly out to win every time and she is quite possibly the most hateful woman on Italian T.V. Like most Italian reality shows they have spent most of the budget on licensing every song from the current top 40 regardless of appropriateness, so we get everything from Carley Rae Jepson to Fun accompanying footage of well dressed middle aged people looking at bathrooms.

In a recent episode a woman wanted to buy a flat in Rome for her 2 daughters to study in while at University. Their budget was 700,000 euros which felt rather like rubbing their good fortune in someone's face considering that the rest of the country is struggling to pay the mortgage on their One AND ONLY family home. Despite my better judgment I felt compelled to watch - as you are at the site of a particularly gruesome traffic accident - curious to see how far Giulia could get her tongue up the client's fundament and what a million euros would buy you in the city where I work.

My poor little Anglo Saxon working class brain was immediately inundated with questions though like:

Why did this woman have to BUY a flat for her daughters to study in?

Why not rent?

Why can't those two lazy bitches get off their arses and find a flat for themselves?

Oh and while they are at it, find part time jobs to pay for the rent?

But then I remembered this is Italy where having a part time job immediately tags you as "poor" and you know, image counts for everything.

My second question though is who is the target audience of this programme? The super rich? They're too busy trying to find tax loopholes. The upper middle classes? But is their desire to get one up on the neighbours worth alienating the rest of the country? I mean you are not going to sympathise with their dilemma of whether to go for the apartment in the centre with the terrace for an extra 200,000 or the extra bathroom in a leafy suburb further out when you are earning 1,000 euros a month? I decided that the programme must be just an obscene joke, a satirical spoof for our austere times. How else could you explain the cartoon hideousness of the presenters? Maybe after the revolution we'll look back and laugh about this, but no one's smiling now.