The hunt, the review: the deadly brotherly love according to Marco Bocci

The review of The Hunt, Marco Bocci’s second directorial work, where brotherly love is overthrown by the power of past memories.

Once upon a time and perhaps there still is: it is the dormant pain, the trauma never faced, the past kept hidden under the carpet of the present and over time transformed into phobia, anguish, insecurities. Once upon a time there was the ballast of a memory infiltrated under the skin, the suffering that quadruples, becoming a fraternal trauma, to be broken and shared in the family, like an unspeakable secret, a memory not to be uttered to box it in the space of the imagination.

As we will point out in this review de Huntingthe black fairy tale directed and performed by Marco Bocci he unties himself from the anchorages of happy endings to delve into the deep darkness of family secrets. What becomes constructive lime is a mixture of reality and fantasy, false memories and welded memories. A bleak, destructive mix, ready to activate when the parties involved meet to collide in the center of a appointment infernal, saboteur, explosive. Nonetheless, something is getting lost in this labyrinth of memories to repress and fraternal reunions to escape from. Built on solid foundations, Hunting he wobbles just when he should deliver the decisive blow. Excellent in presenting his pawns, he doesn’t find the courage to move them within his own perverse game of traumas and unspoken, tiptoeing on the rhetorical surface of an exacerbated and never really refined morality.

The hunt: the plot

Luca, Giorgio, Silvia and Mattia are four brothers with different characters and divergent lifestyles. Luca (Philip Nigro) is a skilled car salesman who plans to expand his business; George (Paolo Pierobon) a father and husband dominated by his own family; Sylvia (Laura Chiatti) is a former drug addict, clean for some time now; Mattia (Pietro Sermonti) a painter who strives to survive with the bare minimum. Following the death of their father, the four meet again in the family villa to resolve the issue of inheritance. And it is precisely in the space of the places that saw them born, grow, suffer, that the shadow of their past comes back to life, hitting them full face. And so, corridors, halls and woods let the memory resurface and with him the fears, insecurities, remorse and thirst for revenge.

The Hunt according to Marco Bocci, Pietro Sermonti and Paolo Pierobon: a film “on the spoiled power of memory”

Black fairy tale for a contemporary tale of hate

It has something of the grotesque tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hunting by Marco Bocci: no “happily ever after” to welcome their protagonists at the end of their journey, but only a bleak “and survived in fear and phobias”. The fact that the pain generated by mourning and continuous guilt reaches the viewer in such a profound way is directly proportional to Bocci’s ability to carefully outline his characters. In an investigative way, the director (here in his second performance behind the camera) pursues each of the four brothers at a safe distance; he shows them to us in their daily lives, revealing their own weaknesses and frailties by their own admission. With determination, he models characters, establishes credible precedents, develops profound psychologies: taken individually, his protagonists exude interest, magnetism, they are human pages of a story in which to immerse oneself and to be explored. It is when the hunt begins and the fight for survival comes to life that everything weakens, deflating like a worn-out balloon.

Serpent Brothers

The family like a nest of snakes; the domestic nucleus as a forge of anguish, frustration and misunderstanding: Marco Bocci borrows a canvas of ancient memories, adapting it to the passing of our times. A reiteration of stories and stylistic features made possible by a basic universality, of family dens in which to hide or from which to escape. Peter Sermonti and Paolo Pierobon become the greatest representatives of the aspirations of lost men, crushed by the weight of torn dreams or suffocating responsibilities. Opposite poles of divergent ways of (surviving) living, Giorgio and Mattia also gather within themselves the lives of their brothers, the erroneous results of parental operations carried out with superficiality, pain, violence. Molecules gone mad, unable to coexist together, Marco Bocci’s brothers are increasingly isolated by talking footage, capable of underlining and reduplicating the frayed ties of brothers who are unable to cling to their mutual affections, letting themselves be overwhelmed by the weight of their past.

It never rains at Tor Bella Monaca, the review: Marco Bocci’s pop neorealism

Killin’ me softly

There is an implicit, hidden force that moves silently in the complex cognitive interlude with which Bocci confidently introduces the past and present of his protagonists into the field. Once the involutionary arcs have been developed, everything suddenly changes: the phases of the hunt with which to annihilate one’s challenging brothers, almost as if to destroy the ghosts of one’s past, lose intensity: madness takes over, but Bocci’s direction does not he manages to manage it, reducing everything to a succession of confusing, exhausted and unconvincing events.

There is none of the struggle for survival typical of the meanest Re Learor of the television cult of Succession: Marco Bocci’s Hunt is a cake with a soft, inviting base; his dough is well compact, while the personal stories of his protagonists are divergent layers, Luciferian, sour, but tasty in their own way; what grout is the taste of the cream that covers everything. An uneven stratification, destined to melt away, in a confusing journey between past and present, ready to get lost in the space of a threatening but never destabilizing, violent, bad timelessness, as it would like.
It’s a bloodless hunt, that of Marco Bocci: a chase full of expectation, but little concreteness. Victims and perpetrators mix, in a black fairy tale colored by an ashy, gray, dark photograph, but colored by a few blood-red shades.