‘Enea’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Pietro Castellitto. Italy. 2023. 117mins

The youngest director in competition in Venice this year, Pietro Castellitto is a talent to watch. His second film, which he wrote and takes the lead role in, is set in what Italians call ‘la Roma bene’, the city of the privileged classes with their tennis clubs and Filipino servants and social cocaine habits. At its core, however, is the portrait of a Dostoyevskian hero who is slowly drowning, not unwillingly, in a swamp of his own making.

 There’s a confidence in the storytelling here 

It’s a stylish film that mixes some flashily impressive directorial gestures with a few wrong turns, especially in its over-long second half. At times it feels like a Millennial’s version of a late-period Nanni Moretti film but, at the same time, you can see why Luca Guadganino might have come on board as producer: there’s a confidence in the storytelling here and an ability to mix melodrama with deadpan comedy that Castellitto shares with the director of Bones And All. Though destined to make a bigger splash at home in Italy, Enea has the potential to dive into a few overseas markets where distributors exist who like to take a gamble on new voices. It doesn’t hurt that, for all the moral rottenness of the city depicted here, Radek Ladczuk’s camerawork with its fine use of natural light is in love with Rome.

Castellitto plays Enea – Italian for ‘Aeneas’ – the owner of a fashionable Roman sushi restaurant whose romantic nature glimmers faintly through a mask of floppy-haired ennui and cynicism. Enea is maybe not the most common name for a thirty-year-old – but his mum, Marina (Chiara Noschese), is the presenter of a TV book programme. She and her youth therapist hubby Celeste (played by Sergio Castellitto, Pietro’s actor father) live in a nice bourgeois house with a nice bourgeois garden and belong to a nice bourgeois country club on the banks of the Tiber.

Despite a flagrant chunk of exposition in the very first scene, it takes us a while to work out who’s who. Newly qualified aviator Valentino, played by Massimo Troisi lookalike Giorgio Quarzo Guarascio, initially feels like part of Enea’s family but turns out to be his bestie and associate in some small-time drug dealing which is just about to escalate. There’s a homoerotic charge in their rapport that is toyed with rather too coyly to feel like much more than fashionable accessorizing. Enea’s other male anchor is his much younger brother Simone (played by the director’s own younger brother Cesare), who is having problems at school – linked, it turns out, to a classmate’s accusation that Enea deals drugs that kill kids. Enea’s love interest, Eva (Benedetta Porcaroli) is never allowed to develop enough of a character to be much more than the pretty woman who shows him, too late, how things might have been different.

In a film that is full of music, from the club classics played at posh villa parties to the ballad by veteran Italian pop star Renato Zero that Valentino sings not once but three times, the film is structured as a kind of waltz. It sways nimbly between characters that include a corrupt journalist and publisher and a drugs middleman with a mother complex, to lend a veneer of divine indifference to what is, deep down, a story about the self-inflicted decline of a spoiled rich kid. In a way, this is the reverse print of all those modish Italia crime capers like Suburra, that always, sooner or later, tell the story from the top. This is the tale of a small cog in the wheel who never gets to see the real puppet masters, only the footsoldiers they send out to terminate those who have screwed up.

It’s an uneven ride: time and again, brilliant intuitions (like the sudden, shocking collapse of a palm tree) are countered by others that should have been red pencilled (one of the worst involves a Japanese chef who works at Enea’s restaurant). What survives the bumps in the road is the strong, fatalistic portrait of an eminently slappable young man who nevertheless possesses an infectious life force; a man who lives as if he is invincible even when he knows the end is nigh.