Review of Boiling Point (2021) by Mauro_Lanari — 26 Mar 2023

(Mauro Lanari).

Alcoholic, cocaine addict, separated from his wife, in debt, latecomer, sleepless, fresh from move: all the imaginable bad luck. Starting from these premises, things could only end badly for him regardless of the type of work. So the now worn-out location of the restaurant is completely superfluous. Authors like Ozu, Bresson, the Tati of "Playtime" ['67] would have made the breaking/collapse/boiling point more dramatic with the still, static, fixed camera to impotently shot the staging of impotence. Barantini makes the opposite choice: convulsive tale and uninterrupted steadicam for 86 minutes out of 92. Raffaele Meale writes that the director "seems to care more about the rhythm and spatiality to be managed than the psychologies of his characters". "Characters"? Unjustified accumulation of Fantozzian clichés. "There is a sense of dissatisfaction, and also emptiness. An exercise in style, not much more." Tzk: "a reflection on the one-shot film in today's cinema, after Hitchcock, Bazin, Metz" (Alessio Baronci). Wow.