Paolo Virzì and «Five seconds», «my journey into the depths of the soul» (score 7 and 1/2)

Why does an established professional (we will discover that he is the partner of an important law firm) decide to cut ties with everything and everyone to retreat to a renovated stable in the countryside, avoiding any contact? What is Adriano Sereni (Valerio Mastandrea) hiding behind a beard that he would like to be as shaggy as his character? To explain who invented himself as the protagonist of his latest film, «Five seconds», presented yesterday at the Rome Film Festival, Paolo Virzì first uses a socio-anthropological category (“he is a bourgeois from Northern Rome” and anyone who has a bit of experience with propaganda-electoral polemics knows what is behind that definition: a cultured, affluent, progressive if not downright left-wing person, to put it in a nutshell) and then uses the psychology: «My film aims to be a journey into mourning, to dig into the abyss of a person who wants – or rather: must – question his own life».

To know what Adriano’s life is like it’s so difficult to do the math, it will take some time, because the screenplay (which the director wrote with his brother Carlo and Francesco Bruni) seems to take it easy, to digress and distract the viewer’s attention towards other topics. Like the noisy arrival of a brigade of twenty-year-olds determined to give new life to the fields that border Hadrian’s hermitage. And his solitude, defended with anger and annoyance, is forced, reluctantly, to deal with a comparison that seems to particularly bother him.

Young people are partly abusive (because they did not ask anyone for permission), partly authorized because the person driving them is the young niece of the former owners, Countess Matilde (Galatéa Bellugi). And it will be she, with her shamelessness, who opens the first breach in Sereni’s defenses, pushing the film onto the path of generational clash: the mature man grappling with a youth that seems to embody all the values ​​(and energies) that he does everything to leave outside the door. But ultimately it’s an (almost) false lead: it’s not the comparison that interests Virzì, rather the possibility of putting his protagonist face to face with the same thing he seems to want to escape from: his own responsibility as a parent.

«Their presence – continues Virzì – forces him to question what it means to be together with others. Thanks to them, this solitary misanthrope returns to asking himself the questions he seemed to want to escape.” Because it’s clear that Adriano is hiding a secret: it’s what drives him every day to send a message to someone who doesn’t seem interested in replying and which instead Giuliana (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a work colleague who behind her terse efficiency suggests a profound if not maternal at least sisterly spirit and who with difficulty manages to overcome his no’s, reminds him again.

So little by little we discover that in the past There is something about Sereni that concerned his family, so serious that it pushed his ex-wife (Ilaria Spada) to bring a lawsuit against him, from which he doesn’t even seem to want to defend himself. And it is at this point that the double path of the film becomes clearer because the intrusive Matilda discovers herself pregnant and the protective spirit of Adriano cannot accept that the girl does not take care of her pregnancy: accused by his ex-wife of not having cared enough about his daughter, the man ends up acting as a “putative father” to the future mother, also defending their right to cultivate those lands or in any case not to be evicted from it.

But it is at this point that the film seems to “rebel” to his screenwriters, to take on a greater value, one that allows him to go beyond the simple plot to delve, using the director’s own words, “into the abyss that a person carries within himself, in the path within his mourning”. We leave it to the viewer to discover how the cinematic journey will find a solution and how it will justify the title, what is certain is that seeing “Five Seconds” one cannot help but think of the pain and anger that all families have to deal with. Even ending up denying Tolstoy: despite their differences, even unhappy families can suffer in the same way, on and off the screen.