Review of Smile (2022) by Mauro_Lanari — 07 Dec 2022

(Mauro Lanari).

Parker Finn and his debut feature run through two incompatible narrative lines: the first one is inspired by Klee's 1940 painting "Tod und Feuer", where pain and death are represented by a grin, an existentialist awareness (evil as "malheur", crisis of meaning) that Rossellini made collide with its psychiatrization in "Europa '51". Didactic film, but on the other hand humanity tends to defend itself from the contagion with this awareness either by repressing it, that is, by mutilating the reality principle, or, even worse, by adapting with insensitivity, cynicism and cruelty. The second one is instead that of the simple concatenation of particular events (suicides, traumas, feelings of guilt), thus contributing to the repression process mentioned above.