Magico realismo. Il cinema di Silvio Soldini

It is difficult to identify role models (initially Godard and Wenders, but also Antonioni and Ozu) for a director like Silvio Soldini who, on the contrary, has been able to bring his own originality to the making of a cinema that is little tied to the Italian tradition and instead very attentive to a broader, almost universalistic scope even when he tells, as often happens, "minimalist" stories of the provinces and simple feelings.

Silvio Soldini's cinema has instilled in viewers expert conceptual doubts by virtue of a path that, from the naturalism and realism of his early films, has increasingly become infused with the lifeblood of metaphor. From identifying the bourgeois Galaxy revealed through the construction of archetypal characters, shrouded in a propensity for aporias and solipsism, to cloaking their daily actions in "surrealism." To enter into social and, indirectly, political exploration, especially through his documentaries and behavioral analysis: to penetrate, therefore, the utopian journey and ecstatic escape, sometimes through "false movements." Silvio Soldini's cinema as an intellectual "periscopic" production of difference, stimulation of doubt, provocation of limpid cultural craft.

These are the themes Domenico Lucchini explores and resolves in a comprehensive and in-depth essay. A circumnavigation that touches every corner of the Milanese auteur's complex narrative, as well as the shores of linguistic interpretation, from the neorealist to the fairytale register (the "magical realism") that pervades his forty films. This is the first comprehensive discussion of Soldini's cinema in Switzerland, a subject missing from Italy for twenty years; the merit is twofold.