From cinema to the most popular Rai fiction, starting with a role as an actor and then as a director with some commercials that have remained in the viewers’ imagination
Alessandro D’Alatri is dead. The Roman director is famous for his association with Kim Rossi Stuart And Fabio Voloand for titles like Just in case And The fever he was 68 years old. When he was a child, D’Alatri was discovered by none other than Da as an actor in a school play Luchino Visconti. So, in the sixties, little Alessandro started acting in TV dramas, in commercials and finally ended up as a boy at the age of 15 in the role of the protagonist Giorgio – Lino Capolicchio is when he grows up – in The garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) by Victor de Sica. Before making his directorial debut on the big screen with American red (1991) – Fabrizio Bentivoglio and Burt Young protagonists and a moderate success with critics and audiences – D’Alatri shot dozens and dozens of commercials, including the famous one paraflu And Ciribiribi Kodakthe memorable sequence for telecom with Massimo Lopez sentenced to deathand yet the whole paradise beach for them Lavazza with Bonoli’s protagonist and who becomes his actor in the cinema.
We talked about the debut that leaves a mark without exaggerating. So here D’Alatri shoots the minimal Without skin (1995) Started partnership with Kim Rossi Stuartt, here a psychopath who falls in love with a postal worker (Anna Galiena) immersed in a story mixed with healthy realism. The film ends no less than at Cannes fortnight in a competition attended by Manoel De Oliveira and Michael Haneke. Except that D’Alatri suffers a kind of spiritual shock and writes with the Jewish writer and poet Milo Silvera The Gardens of Eden (1998), where we find Rossi Stuart as Jesus between the ages of twelve and thirty. The movie comes in Competition at the Venice Film Festival but it is shot down by various critics, including Paolo Mereghetti, who defines it as “a kind of New Age ecumenism full of tongue-in-cheek tongues indecipherable to the viewer who is not an expert in the history of religions”.
D’Alatri, who will describe himself as an “absent-minded Catholic,” will then shoot Just in case 2001 with Fabio Volo and Stefania Rocca, the story of a couple on the way to marriage in a somewhat leaden atmosphere with a priest (the future director). Gennaro Nunziante) proposing the abscissa and ordinate of her future, including the entire chapter of guilt regarding the protagonist’s abortion. D’Alatri deviates sharply from the more “left” thematic philosophical vulgate of Italian directors of the 1990s/early 2000s, but his films always have a certain fluidity of writing and a lively and dogged direction that pushed the story through every possible chink becomes .
After, in fact, here The fever (2005), which goes to the city of Virzì and all the filmographers of Ligabue with the contemporary Caterina, seems a bit of a kindPopulist cinemas ante litteram, with Nunziante and Starnone in the script. Again Volo the protagonist of the film, city surveyor with very different dreams in his drawer, but also with a not exactly hidden criticism of the shackles and follies of the Italian bureaucracy system, so much so that thethe President of the Republic (Arnoldo Foà), to whom the protagonist returns his identity card in protest. Next year is the day comedy sexstrange and whimsical staged in the form of a morals/political comedy that has the protagonist Paul Bonolis and again Nunziante pre Zalone on the screenplay.
Basically, the repeated escapade of the honorable Catholic Bonfili (Bonolis), his own law in defense of the family, with a little girl (Elena Santarelli), rather than seeing dramaturgical lines developed from Pochade (Bonolis playing angry and vaguely banatic crowds), follows a Development of the hypermoralistic story that nails the honorable to a mammoth and indelible mistake turns the comedy into a vaguely tragic farce. The fact is that the film grossed over seven million euros at the box office and D’Alatri definitely reaffirms its politically transversal presence in Italian cinema, plagued by experimentalism and intellectualism and never (even then) interested in a more culturally conservative and less libertarian or left, certainly rather predisposed to large numbers in theaters (see the use of volo and bonolis).
Next comes a practically invisible romantic comedy – By the sea, 2010 — and a decent fincher model thriller titled The startup in 2017. Although in recent years D’Alatri has finally committed himself to TV fiction and became one of the leading directors of the Rai series, Pizzofalcone’s bastards and meCommissioner Ricciardi.