It has been released the official trailer of Il fuoco che ti porti dentro, the film presented in competition at the last Venice Film Festival that Edoardo De Angelis has adapted from the eponymous novel by Antonio Franchini, published by Marsilio Editori, which is one of the fundamental works of Italian literature in recent years. In that novel Franchini reconstructs and details the conflicted and complicated relationship with a mother who is, to say the least, burdensome — a woman with a sharp, exuberant, exaggerated, uncompromising, disdainful character — in a manner as direct as it is ruthless. The opening line is famous for this reason: “Although by many she is considered a beautiful woman, my mother stinks.”
If Franchini dealt with the maternal figure by narrating an entire life, De Angelis and his screenwriters, Francesco Piccolo and Ilaria Macchia, decided to concentrate those themes and that relationship into a single day, Christmas Eve, which the protagonist Antonio (portrayed by Lino Musella) spends in his Milan home with his family and with his mother Angela (an extraordinary Vanessa Scalera) who has arrived on a visit from Milan.
To us, De Angelis’ film was very much to our liking, as you can read in this review, and we therefore recommend you go see it as soon as it debuts in theaters on November 19, distributed by 01 Distribution. Here below, the plot and the official trailer of Il fuoco che ti porti dentro.
Antonio, who fled from Naples many years ago, has built a family and a successful career in Milan. He has escaped his city, but also from his mother Angela, a woman who is excessive in good and bad ways — irresistible, philistine, conservative and hostile as few — who has caught up with him for Christmas and seems determined to stay with him. The Christmas Eve dinner thus becomes an emotional battlefield, both comic and fierce at the same time, that brings back a past of domination and misunderstandings. A sentimental head-to-head between mother and son but also with a stubborn capon that refuses to end up in the pot; with the waiting of a daughter whose arrival is uncertain and an illustrious yet unexpected guest. A reckoning between mother and son, destined to forever change the meaning of their bond. A love that burns like an inexhaustible fire and that no separation could ever extinguish.
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