Margini
Directed by Niccolò Falsetti
Running time: 1hr31 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Margini stars Francesco Turbanti, Emanuele Linfatti and Matteo Creatini
At the risk of making wild, unfair cultural generalisations, there is great comedy to be mined from juxtaposing traditional Italian priorities with hardcore punk. Margini follows the fortunes of a small but spirited punk band living in Grosseto, a functional town in Tuscany which is more or less the opposite of all things punk. I’ve been there, and it really is a perfectly cast location.
The jokes may be easy, but they are no less funny for all that. A young would-be punk pestering his mother, who of course he lives with, to find out if she has laundered his T-shirt — “the one with the dead pigeon on it” — may be an easy target, but there’s real affection there too.
More broadly, the idea of anyone who has grown up enjoying all the thousands of little civilisations which make the traditional Italian way of life so superior to much of the rest of the world, attempting to embody the energy of an anarchic movement defined by its nihilistic attitude to creature comforts, whose foremost icons spat on each other and huffed glue fumes, is a delight. There is a charming scene set in the Grosseto town hall where our heroes attempt to convince a town council factotum to help them find a venue for their heroes, a visiting American hardcore band, only to be told that regrettably it will clash with a local heritage event, “a historical reconstruction of the Siege of Ludwig the Bavarian.” Helpfully, she suggests that instead they could perhaps try the local centre for the elderly, or otherwise contact Fr. Angelo at the Sagrada Familia.
The dissonance between the roots of hardcore and the aesthetics of Italy isn’t just a subject to be mined for light comedy, however. For a country that has suffered significant economic decline over the last twenty years or so, alongside a resurgence in right-wing politics, with plenty of its youngest, best and brightest leaving the country in favour of more attractive job markets, the concerns of punk — revolution, anti-decadence, and nihilism as a response to a failure to offer people a more positive future — have never been more relevant. What Margini dramatises is the difficulty of animating those concerns from within a beautiful but conservative national aesthetic that lends itself seductively to a nostalgic picture postcard vision of a nation, rooted in the past. The UK may like to take note.
MARGINI (2022) Written by Niccolò Falsetti, Tommaso Renzoni, Francesco Turbanti | Shot by Alessandro Veridiani | Edited by Stefano De Marco, Roberto Di Tanna
Screened in Critics’ Week at the 79th Venice Film Festival
