photograph
- courtesy La Biennale
di Venezia
Happy
Winter
Giovanni
Totaro
In Giovanni Totaro’s Happy Winter, every summer
on Mondello Beach in Palermo, more than a thousand cabins are erected to house
the same number of groups of bathers who will spend the season in them. For
these people the “huts” are the perfect setting in which to hide behind the
memory of a social status that the crisis of recent years has undermined. A
family gets into debt to go on a seaside vacation and to look well-off among
the bathers, three women sunbathe in order to feel as if they are still young
and to become the stars of the summer, while on the same beach a barman thinks
about earning as much money as possible to get through the winter. Everyone is
waiting for the night of August 15 to play a leading role in the summer Vanity Fair
and to keep on pretending that the economic crisis doesn’t exist.
“The possession of a seaside bathing hut
represents an illusion of affluence distant from everyday life, which is slowly
stripping the middle class of the gains it has made. Happy Winter sets out to convey this sense of community with
its natural contradictions, stemming from a holiday with condominial, at times
tribal aspects, remote from the clichés of a vacation by the sea. In this
summer holiday village seen as a metaphor for Italy, the economic worries
tackled under the beach umbrella find a response in the cultural crisis of
Italians. In the film the enjoyable and carefree aspect of the beach is tainted
by a bitterness that is always present in the stories, a sort of unpaid bill
that connects the protagonists with their return to “normality”. This microcosm
enclosed in a glass bead has a precise end: on September 15 the bathers empty their
huts, wishing each other a Happy Winter.”
Giovanni Totaro
Director
Contessanally – Kitschy hyperrealism of life on the beach
in Sicily – 7/10
#Venezia 74 – Palazzo del Cinema
Sala Grande
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