Commander, Paolo Mereghetti’s review of the film with Francesco Favino

CORDER

Type: Humanistic war drama

Direction: Edoardo De Angelis

Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Jehannes Wirix, Silvia D’Amlico, Giuseppe Brunetti, Pierfilippo Agati, Giustiniano Alpi

Commandertwo films in one

The history of Commander Salvatore Todaro who sank in the Atlantic in 1940 with the submarine Cappellini a Belgian freighter carrying war material and who decided to save the enemy crew, endangering the safety of himself and his men, gave rise to a film divided into two: in the first part the “muscular” cinema of Edoardo De Angelis gives shape to Todaro’s patriotic and military spirit, so attached to his duty that he wears painful armor (due to a broken back) just to not abandon his post.

In the second, with the characters closed in the small space of the submarine, the film becomes a kind of theater of ideaswith the camera almost always glued to the sailors’ faces, giving greater emphasis not to the actions but to the words (written by the director with Sandro Veronesi).

Thus the characters have the upper hand over ideological justifications and the dialectal underlinings acquire the flavor of an ecumenical embrace that cancels out any rhetoric, like the beautiful idea that a Neapolitan can learn to fry chips from a Belgian. And the film finds that balance between “form”, “content” and “message” which at the beginning risked escaping it.

For those who want to remember how to behave at sea.

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