“Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” Mickey Rooney’s habitual clarion call to Judy Garland, the starting gun for so many toe-tapping, feel-good Saturday afternoon musicals when both were child stars in the 1930s, has bounced down the years and spread across continents, because who does not love a jolly film about kids putting on a show?
Toe-tapping has gone by the wayside by 2008 in the Tuscan city of Grosseto; the music of choice in Niccolo Falsetti’s Venice Film Festival Critics’ Week entry Margins is optimistically described as “street punk” by the fans and just “very loud” by their long-suffering neighbors. Never mind: essentially, the song remains the same.
Grosseto is the kind of town nobody visits. The kids — not that any of them is still a kid — are Edo, Miche and Iacopo, hardcore devotees with a handful of songs they play in a friend’s isolated barn. Their band is called Wait for Nothing, which suggests they got the name out of an unusually accurate fortune cookie. What they really, really want is to play a proper concert. They would happily play support to a better band, as long there were plenty of heads banging and moshers moshing. So what if they could get the money, a venue and equipment and bring a proper touring band to their town?. Wow, that’s a swell idea, Mickey! I know we can do it!
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Falsetti grew up in Grosseto. Now 35, he still plays in the hardcore band he set up at school with Francesco Turbanti, who co-wrote the script for this film and plays Wait for Nothing’s drummer, Miche. Edo (Emanuele Linfatti) is the guitarist. Iac (Matteo Criatini) is the bass player, but his position in the band is increasingly precarious: he is also a classical cellist who has been asked to join a touring orchestra under Daniel Barenboim’s baton. This concert will be his one last chance to show conviction as a disaffected youth.
It is a very mild disaffection they share, however. Miche is full of punk bluster out in the street, but melts like blancmange around his wife and daughter. Edo’s mom is still ironing his wardrobe of souvenir tour T-shirts. Who irons T-shirts? Only the kind of Italian momma who, when belatedly throwing her son out of home, tearfully urges him to call her if he wants food.
Edo deserves worse. He led the charge to steal the sound equipment from his stepfather’s dance club — having already dismissed the club itself, which has a gaudy flashing dance floor and an over-active bubble machine, as a suitable venue for their hardcore happening — and smashed the place up for fun while they were at it. Never mind, a mother forgives her boy. When Miche plucks up the courage to tell his wife he has spent all their savings on airfares for the visiting American band, she is so horrified she forgets to be angry. Anyway, she will fix it. She will take extra shifts as a cashier at the supermarket. What can you do? This is Miche’s dream.
If that sounds like nothing less than an Italian male fantasy — well, here it is, folks. These boys are essentially narcissistic spongers, but the film has forgiven them their foibles before it starts. They may be in the margins — geographically, socially, economically — but they stand by each other. As for their grand scheme, it all turns out as Mickey and Judy would have wanted.
At this pleasingly undemanding level, Margins pogoes along at a cracking pace; Falsetti, who has honed his skills making music videos and high-end commercials, has a grasp of narrative economy that he might profitably share with some of the more renowned directors on the Venice program.
And when the visiting Americans — actually the Italian hardcore band Payback — take the makeshift stage in the Grosseto community center, the swirl of dancing bodies and ascent of the crowd-surfers is shot with a poetically charged excitement so immediate and immersive that you feel you’re there. What’s more, you actually want to be there, no matter how loud it is. And that — especially for a small film clearly made with slender means, but for any film — is quite an achievement. Well done, ragazzi. Great show.
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