In An Artificial Weekend, Leonardo (of course played by Pieraccioni), a quiet and somewhat disillusioned hairdresser from the outskirts of Florence, is invited to the villa of a very wealthy engineer whose poodle he occasionally grooms. With him are other guests who do not know one another, and the Engineer asks that they be addressed only by their professions: Leonardo is the Hairdresser, and with him there are the Director, the Designer, the Perfumist, the Intern, the Psychologist, and the Retiree. It is not a random invitation, because for his guests the Engineer has a challenge: after a day spent together, and a night of reflection, these people must discover who among them is the highly sophisticated prototype of a humanoid endowed with an equally sophisticated, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence that, according to this Italian tech mogul obsessed with the New Age and with Japan that created it, is indistinguishable from a real human being.
This is the starting premise of An Artificial Weekend, the new film written (with Filippo Bologna and Andrea Bassi), directed and starred in by Leonardo Pieraccioni, the 16th in a career that began with a bang in 1995 with The Graduates. A film this one that has been in Italian cinemas since November 12 distributed by Vision Distribution, in which the Tuscan artist reasons, with the style and tone that suit him, about one of the great themes of the present, namely the growing presence of Artificial Intelligence in our lives. Watching the film, Pieraccioni’s position is clear: no matter how sophisticated and advanced AI may be, it lacks—and perhaps will always lack—something, and that something is the spark of the human soul, which lights up also thanks to the small pleasures of everyday life as well as to the profoundly humane little and big misfortunes and struggles with which we all have to contend every day.
An Artificial Weekend: the trailer
If what has been described so far is the premise, indeed, over a relatively short period it will become clear who among the group is the humanoid: only that this artificial creature, thanks to the grafting in of memories from others, is convinced it is human. And when it discovers, precisely thanks to the Leonardo played by Pieraccioni, the truth about itself, it will ask and obtain from this new friend and travel companion to be guided toward the discovery of real life, and of everything that makes a human being truly human, including feelings, dances, games, surreal experiences in Italian bureaucracy and even a hastily arranged fake wedding.
And so, on one hand—without exaggerating, mind you—An Artificial Weekend seems to draw a parallel between its Cristiana (played by Giulia Vecchio) and Rachel from Blade Runner (also an android who discovered she was not human); on the other hand, in the journey that Cristiana will undertake with Leonardo to discover the things of life and the world, there is the whole desire to become truly human that Pinocchio the puppet possessed, the quintessential Italian (and not by chance Tuscan) fairy tale. And all this narrative, the story of An Artificial Weekend, is also framed between an opening and a closing act that, as in the legendary Febbre da Cavallo, unfolds in a courtroom where the defendant Leonardo must tell the judge his story, which is the film’s story.
If Pieraccioni does not fail to be accompanied by seasoned supporting players such as the ever-sultry and anarchic Massimo Ceccherini and the milder and trusted Giorgio Panariello (though there are also other old acquaintances like Paolo Hendel and Tosca d’Aquino), the film’s cast also delves into new names within his cinematic universe such as Giovanni Esposito, Herbert Ballerina, and Roberto Zibetti, as well as lesser-known talents on the big screen or rising stars like Marta Zoboli and Alessandro Mauthe.
Finally, a musical note: Pieraccioni has included, in a crucial scene of his film, one of Vasco Rossi’s most famous songs, “Sally,” which, in his view, tells the Cristiana character very well; in the past the Tuscan had shown a fondness for Vasco, placing Una canzone per te in the soundtrack of Fireworks and choosing Marjo Berasategui, who was the star of the videoclip of “Rewind,” as the actress in I Love You in All the Languages of the World.
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