WARNING: if you continue reading you may come across spoilers on the third and fourth episode of Call My Agent Italia, a series broadcast every Friday on Sky!!
Call my agent soon. A Che Guevara entered my garden. The Italian remake of Ten percent (of which there is already a spoiler-free review) is back again this week on Sky with the third and fourth episodes. The Italian star system needed something like Call My Agent e Call My Agent he needed something like the Italian star system to show us that yes, remakes can be crazy cool sometimes. It takes a few episodes to figure it out. The resemblance even physical of the characters of Call My Agent Italia with the fees of Ten percent had prompted us at the beginning to sift through every equivalence between one product and another, heedless of enjoying instead what Lisa Nur Sultan he had scripted for our very Italian palates. Although basically a calque of the popular French series – they have copied it in India, Turkey, South Korea and Great Britain -, the made in Italy version of the format conceived by Fanny Herrero he uses his original only to set up a plot that thrives however on unpublished deviations and brilliant pocketing. It’s not just the big box of entertainment that ends up under the teeth of a good-natured and self-deprecating satire like that of Call My Agent. Are the vices and weaknesses of an entire society to serve the assist for a parody that is not limited to the star system and its mechanisms, but goes beyond, entering our personal sphere, which ultimately is not so distant from that of any known face of the show.
Call My Agent Italia enjoys making fun of us all. Convinced that we laugh at movie stars, we actually laugh a little at ourselves, at our foibles and silly paturnias.
On the other hand, who has never been stuck in the life of another, struggling to break away from it? Who has never been misunderstood on social media or overshadowed in the workplace by a colleague half our age? The dilemma is one that would have excited Gigi Marzullo in the late evening: Are the stars more like us or are we more like the stars? A worry that will not abandon us until the end of the Sky series. But between us and them, between us common and dissatisfied spectators and the protagonists of the great entertainment machine – equally common and dissatisfied -, there are them: The agentsa cross between the earthly and the mundane, between real life and its Instagram version. Maurizio, Lea, Gabriel ed Elvira mediate, intercede, solve problems, heal conflicts, come to the rescue. But they also make big messes, they get lost, they create havoc, they become entangled in seemingly unsolvable issues. This middle world that stirs and squabbles behind the scenes of the big stage is their impregnable and eager realm, the one in which the raw material becomes a refined diamond. And no, it’s not Amici by Maria De Filippi.
Guest stars of the third and fourth episode are Pierfrancesco Favino & family and Matilda De Angelis.
While the horizontal plot is enriched with ideas – with the inspection of the finances in the agency, Gabriele’s slightly too attentive attentions towards the (non) aspiring actress Sophia (He says), Maurizio’s tactical maneuvers to avoid losing his job, fights between colleagues and much more – the individual episodes focus instead on customers and their dilemmas. Problem of the third episode: Pierfrancesco Favino (just that of “Favino makes them all”) He got lost. Wife and children tried to rummage in the old interpretations, but nothing: del Favino in charge of presiding over the David di Donatello ceremony together with Piera Detassis there is no trace. Instead of him, a Che Guevara in camouflage and unkempt beard he wanders around the garden of the house playing the guitar and praising the Revolution. The barricadero of the Cupolone, Er Chethe nightmare of housekeepers subscribing to multinational sprayers, one of the many doppelgängers to whom Favino has lent his face, has taken possession of the actor’s house. Where is Pierfrancesco? everyone wonders, worried that the Mario Bambea syndrome has also sunk one of the most prolific actors on the Italian film scene. More than double him, Favino remained a prisoner in his millionth io. The same fate befell a Jean Dujardin in Ten percent. The only way out, whether it’s in France or Italy, was one thunderous crash with reality. And the image of a McDonald’s teeming with Cubans in downtown Havana – i.e.: capitalism biting the revolution – makes more noise than Jennifer Lawrence’s tumble at the 2013 Oscar ceremony. Lea e Anna Ferzetti they kill Che and resurrect Pierfrancesco Favino. However, he is such a versatile talent that he can get out of Che Guevara and enter into Mario Draghi with the same speed with which a shitstorm spreads on the web. And then, change of clothes: the show must go on. Whatever it takes... (at the Favino house in the meantime they secretly ripped up the contract for the role of Matteo Messina Denaro, you never know)
And it is precisely of a social storm that is instead the victim – and unwitting perpetrator – Matilda De Angelis, also a guest star very comfortable playing herself. The actress ends up in the trending topic due to an innocent joke which, in the alienating bubble of social media, turns into an offense to none other than the victims of the Holocaust. And so comments, insults, distancing, reproaches, mass abandonment of followers, stop productions. The grain of Vittorio it’s pretty big, especially if it’s an agent who takes care of the dynamics of social networks as well as father-daughter relationships. And in fact the patch she tries to put in is worse than the hole, which has already become an abyss in just a few clicks. Matilda De Angelis has just become the icon of the deniers of half of Italy – “we are many” suggests her elderly neighbor -, but the protean mood of the web varies according to the propaganda fodder that is fed to it: so it is enough to turn a gaffe into a brilliant idea to come out with a lot of thumbs up on the live broadcasts Instagram. With rare exceptions… The central episodes of Call My Agent Italia they make us immediately lower the finger pointed against in advance the usual “too Italian” remakes and they let themselves be watched until the end with that desire to have more and more. Next Friday the last two episodes of the series, the ones in which they will make an appearance, will be broadcast on Sky Stefano Accorsi and Corrado Guzzanti come guest star. In Call My Agent Italia 1×03/1×04in addition to the regular characters and the artists who lent themselves to the game, we also found the very young – and very busy – Federico Ielapi it’s a Joe Bastianich unaware father of Camilla, as well as the permanent presence of Emmanuel Fanelli which makes that vein of irony that pervades the whole show even more incisive.
