Michele Placido has been an constant figure in the Italian cinema for decades now. He directed one of my favorite Italian films of the 90's "Un Eroe Borghese" and starred in some glorious Italian titles of the last 30 years but he himself has gone the road of so many others, he has "practiced" his craft hasn't cultivated it. There is a palpable sense of pretension in his work, trying to be "important" that goes head to head with a deep seated personal, cultural ignorance. Here he indulges in some personal memories connected to the tumultuous 1968, isn't that convenient? But, as it happens to someone who has remain in the intellectual periphery of things, "Il Grande Sogno" doesn't serve us to understand his memory or his beliefs, if any. Riccardo Scamarcio, Placido's alter ego in this case, displays an element of truth, absent in all of his wort for the last few years but his intention as a character is as falsely profound as the film itself. The generational conflict that the period created remains at the threshold of a really compelling story. I loved Luca Argentero and Laura Morante. The film is bloated with self importance but empty from every imaginable angle. As if this wasn't depressing enough, at the press conference, Placido exploded when a journalist ask him how he, a committed left wing man made a film financed by the right wing Mediaset, he didn't have a rational answer of course instead a really childish one, plus, accused the journalist's country of invading countries, sending people to die and then making movies about it to appear good and decent. The statement was ignorant and ridiculous in itself but to make it worse was the fact that Placido launched the attack to the journalist thinking she was English when in fact she was Spanish. In a way the incident reveals what wrong with Placido's film.
Review of The Big Dream
