Read the film review with Adam Driver

“History is more or less nonsense. “We want to live in the present, and the only history that deserves interest is the history we make today,” the businessman told the Chicago Tribune in 1916. Henry Ford, the owner of Ford and creator of the assembly line system that ultimately immortalized his name. The statement summarized his philosophy and his cinema helped to celebrate Fordism, often in a dystopian way, as the greatest symbol of capitalism.

Ford hovers over the film Ferrari like an almighty shadow. In 1957, Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is on the verge of bankruptcy because its indebted team is unable to transform the already established myth of its cars into sustainable industrial production. Selling Ferrari to Ford is a possibility. The company's future will depend on a victory in the famous Mille Miglia race, which Enzo sees as his Holy Grail throughout the film. (Racing is becoming a fleeting thing to the extent that every victory in the sport and on the assembly line only leads to the need for new victories.)

This is the oppression of the present. It dictates and drives the plot in the film. Michael Mann, defines the tragic fate of its characters and turns its narrative into a poignant examination of history as a haunting of the present. Ferrari disguises itself as a motorsport film in order to confirm through a disillusioned and unsparing production that never makes its characters more selfconfident than they need to be the dramaturgical maxim that it is the action that should move the themes and subtexts of a film, and not the other way around.

In addition to the real events surrounding Enzo and the Mille Miglia, the choice of Italy as the film's setting is fundamental to the success of what Mann articulates, as it is perhaps the country that most clearly makes the past an integral part of its landscape . Ferrari takes the images that seem obligatory in Hollywood's vision of the country the opera, the monuments, the church, the baroque tendency and then removes their historical dimension in the urgency of the day. The church scene in which the men keep their hands on the stopwatch during mass is a rare poetic license in a film that remains faithful to the codes of austerity; It exists to speed up the action, but also to remind us that the oppression of the present ignores the division of space

But before the past and history hurt Ferrari through the whims of fate, they always shape the film with their traces in its habitats, and that is why they appear haunting here. £o. The character of his wife Laura Ferrari is nothing more than an incarnated spirit (Penelope Cruz), reimagining the grieving matriarch of Italian cinema classics. Michael Mann is a master of the closeup and here he uses his famous framing with effect and precision, which highlights two faces, one in the front and the other in the background, to make Laura the pursuer. It will stay that way forever remind Enzo over his shoulder of the everlasting cost of his actions.

Enzo becomes a great tragic figure in that he does not ignore history. He only ritualizes his memory when, for example, the film makes a point of following his steps to the cemetery's vertical mausoleums where his deceased relatives rest. In everyday moments, Adam Driver's every gesture takes on the gravity of the present and it is up to the viewer to contextualize its meaning; The character is capable of being very careful not to wake his family when he starts the car, but the full significance of this modesty is only understood in context that is, in the story when we realize shortly afterwards He is not this one, he is the “official” family.

There's an impeccable exercise in narrative in all of this, but Michael Mann doesn't do it in a detached way as it might seem. The fact that the script minimizes the “sports movie” aspects does not eliminate the charm of the car, the speed, all that contemporary charm that remains latent in the urgency with which the film moves forward with conviction. £o. The 20th century was defined by this logic, in short, that progress waits for no one, and we follow this logic to this day. Man could not make Ferrari without taking into account that the machine in this impulse has a fundamental affective and symbolic value, so his film ignores all the cynicism of what has been made in recent years about the fetishistic fantasy of the car (review of Titane in the). (Ferrari's lighting only underlines the cruel literalism of the Cannes winner) and seeks its closest counterpart in Crash Strange Pleasures (1996) to illustrate our drives for pleasure and destruction with the machine. A

We feel sorry for the car. The Ferraris parading and disemboweling themselves here are not extensions of the human body as in Crash, Car and Body in a symbiosis of body horror they actually completely replace the human body, which then becomes, in other words, an unpleasant reminder of our mortality becomes , a reminder of time.

The year 2023 may be remembered in American cinema as an interregnum, a moment when its renowned authors united in remorse. Oscar darlings and siblings like “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Ferrari,” “Iron Claw” and “Oppenheimer” combine to emphasize the decline of empire, late capitalism and 1920s ideology. Trump card in narratives that examine the trail of blood left by Fordist progress, the pursuit of success, and American predestination. Ferrari is the best of them.