A source of inspiration that seems inexhaustible! Two years before his masterpiece The Great Silence released the same year as The good, the bad and the ugly of his compatriot Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci signed in 1966, Django, a spaghetti western filmed in Spain. After around thirty unofficial sequels, only one official sequel and an update in 2012 by Quentin Tarantino’s remake (Django Unchained), it’s the turn of the team behind Gomorrah, to reinvent this radically violent western for an eponymous series in 10 episodes. We thus find Leonardo Fasoli and Maddalina Ravagli on the screenplay, and Francesca Comencini (the talented daughter of the immense Luigi Comencini) on the production and artistic direction. How the series Djangobroadcast this Monday at 9:10 p.m. on Canal +, modernizes the western with Italian sauce?
“This new arena of New Babylon”
Django’s action takes place in the city of New Babylon, a utopia resulting from the chaos of the Civil War and its violence, where the left behind, of all ethnic origins, seek to create a purely egalitarian society. It is in this city of pariahs that a mysterious lonely cowboy, Django (Matthias Schoenaerts) arrives in search of his lost daughter, Sarah (Lisa Vicari). “This new arena of New Babylon, we are not in a normal western city, but really in a utopian place”, estimates Olivier Bibas, director of Original Creation Canal +, that 20 minutes met during a roundtable organized by the encrypted channel.
A “man in crisis” as hero
“The hero Django, wonderfully played by Matthias Schoenaerts, is an antihero, an outsider, a man against power, as in Corbucci’s film, he is also a man in crisis, who has been disappointing and who is trying to build a second chance”, comments Francesca Comencini.
Now an adult and about to marry John Ellis (Nicholas Pinnock), the idealist who founded New Babylon, Sarah wants Django to leave town, fearing that his presence will endanger the town that adopted her. But he doesn’t want to lose her a second time…
The inhabitants of New Babylon “must build their community, but this community is poor and, as in many utopias, full of contradictions. It is a city without rules and where most people live outside the law,” explains Leonardo Fasoli.
“The antagonist is a female character”
Conversely, the nearby town of Emdale, ruled by the tyrannical and powerful Elisabeth Thurman (Noomi Rapace), represents religious conservatism and menace. “What I found interesting was the reversal of roles, and in particular the fact that the antagonist is a female character. And she is the fiercest guardian of a patriarchal order being a woman. This reversal is extremely interesting and contemporary,” says Francesca Comencini.
The scriptwriters were inspired by the diaries of people who left for the Far West at the end of the 19th century: “People who left a society that no longer suited them, but who did not know what they were going to discover when they arrived. What we did with our characters comes directly from what we read in his diaries,” says Maddalina Ravagli.
A western “between homage, fidelity and infidelity”
Francesca Comencini found the sets for Django not in Spain, but in Romania. “I applied myself to finding a visual universe that pays homage to the westerns that really formed me, those of the 1970s by Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci”, comments Francesca Comencini. The artistic director sought “balance between homage, fidelity and infidelity”.
“There are codes, epic moments, action scenes, and references, almost hidden in the scenes, to the westerns that I loved. I tried to capture the epic and visual side of the genre while having a very intimate heart with family drama inside. All the characters are led to find in themselves a kind of superhuman strength in relation to the hostile and dangerous world around them, and also in relation to themselves and their families”, she analyzes.
The result is a Shakespearian family tragedy navigating between past and present, a narrative centered on the intimate exploration of its characters, all set to an electronic soundtrack. “It was clear that it was impossible to try to remake Enio Morricone was impossible. The group Mokadelic revisits the genre with their electronic music which takes into account certain themes and codes of western music, but in a different way”, comments the director. Brief, Django dusts off the spaghetti western, while keeping its eminently political and epic essence.