THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Tizza Covi, Italian, and Rainer Frimmel, Austrian, met in the 1990s at the Vienna University of Art and Design and have worked together since 1996. In 2002, they founded a production company together, then in 2009 they are making their first feature film. The Pivellina, the story of an abandoned little girl taken in by a couple of Circassians, is immediately noticed for the feeling of authenticity and strength that emanates from it. The two artists, in fact, decline an aesthetic on the fringes of documentary and fiction. Filming with non-professional actors, they invite them to enter into a fictional story with them, which could virtually be theirs and where they would play their own role.
The process is not new, it is not always operational either, but its success, when it takes place, reveals a very particular intensity and charm. Covi and Frimmel – like a Jean-Charles Hue in France (The BM of the Lord, 2011) – are among those filmmakers who have won the bet hands down. Their attraction to the world and to performing artists, generally in trouble, eccentric on the margins of a society that only seems to tolerate them, develops from film to film, with The shine of the day (2012), then Mr. Universe (2016).
New lap with Vera, nothing has, a priori, to like the character, at least as the film reveals it to us. Completely redone in her fifties, bimbo with a white Stetson and long peroxidized hair, Vera is a failed actress, a bling-bling demi-mondaine who goes to parties and posts the results of her nocturnal excesses on the Internet. The film would be unnecessarily cruel if it contented itself with the image that this prologue gives us of its heroine. As well, we take the bet, not a spectator or a spectator will leave the room without being fraternally or sororally, or even more, in love with Vera.
cult of beauty
Daughter of a very popular actor in Italy – Apollo Giuliano Gemma (1938-2013), star of peplums and spaghetti westerns, also crossed on the side of our Angelica, Marquise of the Angels (1964) – she devotes a desperate filial feeling to this father. She owes her, as such, her vocation as an actress and this cult of beauty which led her not to put up with the outrages of age. The profession of actor and the passage of time being what they are, here she is today, destitute, in front of the camera of Covi and Frimmel, and transplanted into a Pasolinian ordeal.
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