«Favolacce»: horror within intimacy

Cinema Wednesdays - Alice Bruxelle

Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlinale 2020, Favolacce, The Swiss-Italian film captures the ordinary, when children choose to commit suicide. A radical response to existential impasse, this tragedy is not played out on a stage. Here's a look back at a disconcerting work.

Two years later Blood brothers (2018), Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo strike right at the heart. Without artifice, they manage to capture the psychological decline of ordinary people with a harrowing sense of realism. Is this a Camusian delirium or a tragic reflection on our times? It doesn’t matter, because behind appearances often lies banal madness, which we disguise with pretense. Under their incisive gaze, the directors mercilessly unmask them, leaving us face to face with an unpredictable inhumanity. Screaming with «realism», The film follows in the footsteps of Michael Haneke, thanks in particular to this genius who manages to thematize horror without taking a stand. 

A sense of the absurd

The D’Innocenzo brothers invite us to delve into a personal diary. Before our prying eyes, a voice-over belonging to one of the children reveals the fate of a family living in a suburban neighborhood not far from Rome. We step into their gardens, their living rooms, their bedrooms. Their lives seem to have it all: children, a job; they are neither poor nor rich. Very quickly, a sense of unease sets in and lingers until the end of the film. The deeper we delve into their private lives, the more the anxiety mounts. Behind the barbecue, the patch of grass, and the floor-to-ceiling window lies, in reality, a profound suffering that is revealed as the camera pulls out. Indeed, the close-ups of faces and body parts strip away the decor to reveal it as raw, unvarnished, and sometimes dirty—an indomitable dust that refuses to be swept under the rug of the neighbors’ pretense. 

The strength of the anxiety that the two directors masterfully manage to build lies mainly in the roles the characters don't play. Here's the thing: their attitude always seems to catch us off guard, and they don't actually play the role for which they've been assigned. Under the bewitching, alienating sun of the Italian suburbs, the line between the roles of parents and children is blurred. Because of the frustrations accumulated by the limits of their social condition, adults have locked themselves into the mechanical nature of their existence. Indifference towards children, violence and jealousy are the consequences of this existential dissatisfaction. Case in point? A young mother who decides to keep her newborn baby in an incubator until the summer is over, or a father who wants to start his life all over again, without realizing that the end result is always the same. These parents running away from their responsibilities bring out a sense of absurdity where the protagonists don't conform to the banal expectations their role would imply. Added to this is a no-frills staging that neither embellishes nor uglifies, thus avoiding the trap of a tragedy dripping in pathos. The camera, on the other hand, is there to show without denouncing. It films the systematic unfolding of a prenatal condemnation.

Self-destruction as the only way out

Children are perhaps more lucid than parents about this verdict. This excess of lucidity on the part of the children sheds light on the only way out they have to avoid sinking into the same grotesque spectacle of average existence: suicide. This desperate gesture also symbolizes a form of revolt, a categorical refusal to live. For the parents, it's a tangible expression of their own failures.

If, for Camus, suicide is not a salvific act in the face of awareness of the meaninglessness of existence, here it seems paradoxically vital. The Camusian solution - that of embracing the absurdity of one's existence and living a life without Hope—is not even considered. Caligula said: «It makes no difference whether I sleep or stay awake, if I have no influence over the order of this world.» The children, worthy heirs to the Caligulan figure, have chosen to renounce life. It is this childish suicide that must give us pause; this cry of paroxysmal despair, this apotheosis of anguish, makes it clear that the only way out is death.

This anguish could also be questioned. Why does it build inexorably throughout the film, when it never relies on the classic devices of a thriller? There's no distinctive soundtrack, no bloody scenes. The father's brutality towards his son is off-screen. Violence is not exploited. It plays an underlying role, as it is never shown. It's not where it should be, just as the parents and children don't act as they should. In short, horror isn't where you'd expect it to be - on the outside, or on TV - but inside the home, in the bedroom, in deepest intimacy. Horror is the fruit of adult conception, and it's children who crystallize it. Horror is in the diary. The dust under the carpet uses the means at its disposal to materialize.  

Favolacce upsets. But is this final gesture of despair not actually the right response? Far from lapsing into a contemporary nihilism that would alienate the whole world, this gesture symbolizes an impossible quest: to regain, perhaps one day, a little humanity. 

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Photo credits: © Pepito Produzioni: Amka Films