Pushpa 2 Reloaded Movie Review: Between raw and magical realism, Matteo Russo observes folklore, youth abandonment and the need for hope, which like the flames of Santa Lucia, should never go out, coming alive again and forever. In theaters from Wednesday, January 22.
Presented as a world premiere at the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival and shortly after at the 41st edition of the Turin Film Festival, directed by Giulio Base, in the movie Competition section, Pushpa 2, Matteo Russo's feature film debut is being released in Italian theaters starting from Wednesday, January 22, distributed by Cattive Produzioni.
Pushpa 2 Reloaded Version Story:
There is a particularly significant passage in this movie debut by Matteo Russo. It has to do with a family sitting around a table. There are those who have to go back to school, those who intimately reflect on the people who have not yet reached that table and those who instead cannot think of anything other than the pyre for the feast of Santa Lucia.
An ancient tradition that annually animates the Crotone community, giving life to real challenges - as ambitious as they are a reflection of a fierce hunger to appear - between the different districts of the Calabrian capital, which in the days leading up to December 13, do everything possible to build the wooden pyramid, subsequently set on fire, larger and more majestic than the others.
In the case of Pushpa 2 Reloaded, Matteo Russo focuses on Fondo Gesù, which is a place of the soul for the young people that the film shows and tells and therefore of perdition and abandonment. The lands of Fondo Gesù are in fact for everyone and no one. A modern Far West where violence does not reign – which Russo confines to the off-screen, arousing inevitable suggestions, albeit rare – but solidarity, the desire to shout to the world or even less, to Calabria or Italy, one’s name, one’s victory.
The collective construction of the Pyre for the feast of Santa Lucia is in fact no small matter. Young people lose themselves and at the same time find each other – and with each other – during exhausting, yet tireless and thoughtful wanderings across the territory in search of wood. Or otherwise in front of the Pyre, which gradually grows, destined to a much shorter life than the young people who with their sole strength have made it so.
On the spiritual strength of the community, which represents a faith in all respects, even if governed by instincts that are solely practical, friendly and hopeful. Matteo Russo has a lot to say and so do his boys, who despite the abandonments and the painful awareness of having grown up in a problematic and conflictual place, never lose sight of the goodness of soul and the value of the group and of support.
Extremely moving and a great example, the ability to confess to each other their desires and will, with respect to those broken families, precisely by that cultural heritage, which Russo inevitably recalls, to then tear it to pieces, breaking it down more and more. Above all with the highlighting of goodness and of what urban and social degradation can sometimes generate, beyond violence, evil and the fall.
Pushpa 2 Movie Analysis:
Between Jonas Carpignano's A Ciambra and Roberto Minervini's Louisiana (The Other Side), Matteo Russo's Pushpa 2, passing through the languages and aesthetics of a certain realism that is sometimes magical - folklore reminds us of Lorenzo Pallotta's splendid Sacro Moderno - and sometimes crude, rediscovers in the lucid, merciless and sincere photography of humanity, even more specifically, youth abandoned to itself, the irreducible and sensational strength of community, union and listening.
The young protagonists of Pushpa 2, although abandoned by society and in some cases even by their family, cannot help but continue to survive, gradually becoming stronger, in the hope that things will change and that destinies can turn towards something more fortunate, concrete and why not, even ambitious.
What a great example the construction of the Pira, a work that takes a long time, but has a short life, that only a great strength of will can bring to completion. Despite the sense of loneliness, despite the hunger for redemption. Ginevra Nervi's soundtrack is splendid, so much so that we would like to hear it more often and it is time that our next cinema and its authors, realize this.
Go to the theater to see Pushpa 2, Matteo Russo is a debutant not to be lost sight of and his young people from Rione Fondo Gesù are anything but forgettable, between smoke, flames, lost hopes and silences, they enter the heart of each of us, despite the pain and the awareness that nothing will ever change easily and a revolution is now necessary. This is why the desire to appear, this is why the thirst for redemption.
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