★★★★ The world as we know it no longer exists: society is falling apart and there is no order or rules. A virus has devastated the planet, killing adults. The children live in wild packs, fighting over what little edible scraps are left lying around. They are immune until puberty, when they begin to suffer the consequences of “rossa” (red), which is what they call the spots that cause fever and finally death. At the same time, nature is taking back what was once its own, smothering cities with its vegetation.
This is the disturbing premise of “Anna”, the literary best seller by the Italian Niccolò Ammaniti (1966) that the writer himself turned into a six-episode television miniseries that can now be seen on AMC. The post-apocalyptic dystopia sounds like a prophecy, especially if we consider that it dates back to 2015, when nothing allowed us to foresee the Coronavirus pandemic.
The plot is set on the Italian island of Sicily, where Anna (Giulia Dragotto), a 13-year-old girl who saw everything disappear four years ago, takes care of her little brother Astor (Alessandro Pecorella), teaches him to read, and follows the instructions from the brown-covered notebook that their mother wrote for them under the title “The important things”, in which she wrote down useful instructions to survive. There is a legend of elders who have survived on the continent, they are preparing a cure and it is only a matter of resisting until they arrive. But there is no time for that, the girl decides to undertake a trip to Palermo and then to Messina, with the aim of crossing the strait and finding a way to save herself. Despite a journey full of challenges and adventures in this hopeless universe, the teenager always finds a way to move on. Until Astor is kidnapped by a tribe of boys who call themselves ‘the blues’.
For readers who love literature it is easy to make parallels, due to human wickedness, with the famous novel “The Lord of the Flies” (1954) by the British William Golding, and also, due to the importance of the journey, with “The Road” (2006) by the American Cormac McCarthy.
Starring young talents, who bring truth to the story, the proposal has a lack of aesthetic neatness that works in its favor, almost as if it were a documentary, and it can only be criticized that, unlike adaptations that give the sensation of having been lengthened , here Ammaniti included too many things in few chapters. Still, as entertainment, it’s worth it.
