Holiday stories can be sorely funny! Storia di vacanze by Pablo and Damiano D’Innocenzo, awarded the screenplay prize in Berlin in 2020 and then shown at the Reims Polar Festival, makes a dazzling demonstration of it. The twins, directors of the poisonous Blood brothers, have put vitriol in their humor to show Italian families not really balanced.
It is in the form of a fable seen at children’s level that Fabio and Damianio D’Innocenzo describe the discomfort of their characters, provoking a grating laugh at the viewer. “This story could be straight out of the work of the Brothers Grimm. A world of sensations, bright colors and smells, even if in the background, everything burns, ”they explain in the press kit.
A strangled laugh
Jealousy, rivalry and pettiness tear grotesque and irresponsible adult characters apart. One often thinks of the universe of Todd Solondz in front of these ominously funny heroes. If the Italian title of the film is “fairy tales”, it is obviously ironic. The obligation made to kids to read their school reports in front of the guests, a baby that his mother keeps in an incubator until the end of the summer … the situations oscillate between the absurd and the tragic.
The Roman suburbs become a nightmarish place in the suffocating summer humidity. Laughter often dies in the throat of the spectator so much the talent of the Daminano brothers analyze with acuity the causes of an inevitable tragedy. Their talent for disturbing and manhandling is bursting with Storia di vacanze.