Title: Friday's Fish.
Film: Short subject in 16mm color.
Treatment, script and direction: Raffaele Lauro.
Production: Nuova Università del Cinema e della Televisione - Via del Tritone, nr.61 - 00187 Rome (tel. 06-6790668, fax 06-6784562, e-mail universi@tin.it).
Cast: Franco Franci, Maria Parravicini Bassetti, Stefano Serafinelli, Mauro Lorenz and Giorgia Costantino.
An elderly husband and wife, Ercole and Estia, walk hand in hand across the Ponte Sublicio bridge, between the Testaccio and Trastevere neighborhoods. The husband is on his way to fish from the banks of the Tiber river, while the wife is going to do her shopping in the Trastevere neighborhood. Ercole carries all the equipment needed by a Friday fisherman: rod, basket and hat. Estia's shopping bag is hanging on her arm. They pass by a young couple, a boy and girl kissing against the railing of the bridge. The ageing husband and wife give each other a knowing wink as they watch the youngsters. When they part, they tell each other to be careful, proof of the affection and the protective feelings which tie them. Ercole, the new Tramp, walks down towards the riverbank. Before leaving for Trastevere, Estia waves to him from up on the bridge. Ercole answers with a joyful wave of his own. Once Ercole has started fishing (or, better yet, pretending to fish), a hood from Trastevere, nicknamed "er Ricotta" because his mother sells cheese, walks up behind him. The new arrival starts making fun of Ercole, to the point of insulting him. He knocks over the fishing basket, teasing him about the fact that the old man never catches anything, and that he's only kidding himself if he thinks he can fish in the Tiber. At first, an irritated Ercole responds to the attack, which is obviously not the first he has suffered. A short time later, Ercole suddenly suspends the heated argument by asking his attacker not to shout, because his wife Estia, who is about to come back from Trastevere, might hear them. And so Ercole is forced to reveal the truth: he is only pretending to fish in order not to disappoint his wife, who still dreams of the Tevere as a sacred river filled with fish. He is fooling her for the sake of love. The fact is that the two small fish which Ercole brings home every Friday are bought at the local fish stand. Estia arrives and waves happily to her husband from up above, asking with a gesture how the fishing is going. Ercole waves back from below, reassuring her that he has caught the two little fish. Once Estia leaves for home, "er Ricotta" comes back into view. "You two are nuts," he yells at Ercole, referring to their strange game. "You're the one with the problem," replies Ercole. "What problem?" er Ricotta shoots back. The tough guy cannot comprehend the tenderness behind love-inspired ruse. The final line spoken by Ercole as he heads for home (but only after having bought the two tiny fish) leaves no room for appeal: "Oh Ricò, you just don't have what it takes to be crazy." As if to say, you're not capable of appreciating true love.
It is no accident that the director has chosen the Ponte Sublicio bridge, which connects Testaccio and Trastevere. The Ponte Sublicio is the oldest bridge on the Tiber, making it sacred to the Romans. Its name comes from the sublicae, the word for the wood planks with which the bridge was constructed. It was considered sacred because, in ancient times, the Romans made human sacrifices from the bridge in honor of their gods. According to legend, Hecules had the sacrifice of humans replaced with that of dummies stuffed with leaves. At certain moments in the year, the High Priest, followed by a procession of the vestals, would leave the Temple of Vesta and reach the Ponte Sublicio along the banks of the Tiber. The Vestals would throw the dummies stuffed with leaves from the bridge in honor of the goddess and in the hope of obtaining good crops and fishing. The current Ponte Sublicio is not the ancient bridge, nor is it the reconstructed version. In fact, though its name is Ponte Sublicio, it is actually the Ponte Aventino. Nevertheless, the director did not want to give up the magic of the name, which so clearly denotes what is a sacred spot in the Eternal City. Nor can there be any ignoring the reference to the two lead characters, who are walking from Testaccio to Trastevere. It is common knowledge that, of all Rome's historic neighborhoods, Testaccio and Trastevere have remained the closest, ethnologically speaking, to their time-honored traditions. By placing the two lead characters between these two neighborhoods, on one of the City's oldest bridges, the director is paying tribute to the legend, the myths, the history and the folk traditions of Rome. And all this is made even more apparent by the names given to the protagonists: Ercole, Estia and "er Ricotta".
The name of the primary male character is Ercole, obviously a reference to the legend of Hercules. And yet the director does not choose a man who is still physically piowerful, tall or muscular. Instead, his Hercules is a short, diminutive, almost frail person. Why? Obviously, the director wishes to endow the main character with a tremendous internal force, regardless of his seemingly fragile physique. All this is revealed gradually, to the point where Ercole, virtually blotted out by the physical bulk of Estia, at first, and then "er Ricotta", grews stronger with every passing line and camera shot. By the end, Ercole has taken on the aura of a gentle giant of heartfelt sentiment, in opposition to day-to-day brutality and incivility. The name of the principal female character is Estia, naturally a reference to the cult of the Goddess Vesta and the Vestals, who were so widely worshipped in Rome during both the Republican and the Imperial ages, as shown by the temples dedicated to the cult of the Goddess. By choosing the name Estia (calling the female lead Vesta, the actual name of the Goddess, would have amounted to an anachronistic simplification), the director carries out a glotological operation through which the name of the Goddess appears to have been transformed, corrupted and firmly rooted, one generation after the next, in the popular tradition. With the name Estia, the director achieves the same effect as with Ercole. Estia is taller than Ercole, practically towering over him, so that, at first glance, she appears to be the dominant part of the couple and Ercole the weaker half. But this is far from true. Right from Estia's first line about the two young people who are kissing, the woman's dreamy sensitivity is brought to the fore, and the same quality is demonstrated by her words of farewell to her husband and her poignant request, "Don't let me down", spoken as Ercole heads down to the riverbank to fish. In the following camera shots, and especially in that taken from Estia's point of view as she looks down at the Tiber from above, the woman's idea of the world is further defined. She has a mythic, dream-like, sacred vision. Estia contemplates a landscape, from the Aventine to the Tiber, with which she is deeply in love: a landscape which, for her, is sacred. The name of the second male character is a nickname : "er Ricotta". Once again, the director's choice is tied to the most authentic tradition of the site. It is no secret that the banks of the river in front of the San Michele a Ripa building and below the Aventine, up to Testaccio, once held the Porto di Ripa Grande, Rome's largest river port. Located in the heart of the City, this facility was connected to the food depots in the area around the slaughterhouse. In later centuries, when the bridges were destroyed or unusable for some other reason, the "barcaroli" began plying their trade. These were ferrymen who took people from one bank to the other in return for money, alternating this activity with the sale of "ricotte", or small baskets of ricotta cheese. In addition to this reference, the bully's nickname is tied to another Roman culinary custom : the raising of goats and sheep in the Roman countryside and the sale of the products made from their milk in the City's less affluent neighborhoods. The director's juxtaposition of appearance and reality continues with the nickname "er Ricotta", which suggests something light, almost immaterial. Instead, the tough guy is emblematic of misunderstanding, ignorance, surliness and rudeness. Nothing could be further removed from the lightness of ricotta cheese.
The three lead characters represent three different approaches to reality: the highest level is that of Estia (the dream); the second, intermediate level is that of Ercole (an awareness of reality which nourishes the dream through love); the third and lowest level is that of "er Ricotta" (the harsh reality which sets out to destroy the dream). Estia harkens back to major figures of Western culture: the characters of Calderòn de la Barca or the monologues of Shakespeare's characters (especially Hamlet). Estia lives in her own world: a world made of small things, a world of tenderness which has no space for violence or negativity. She is a character who sits outside of reality, one of the insane, in the sense Pascal would give to the term! She is a totally anachronistic character compared to the spectacle of violence, blood and intimidation of which day-to-day living in a metropolis is full to overflowing: But is this really true, she seems to wonder, as the director asks the same question? Might it not be Estia, for all her strangeness, who comes closest to the essence of reality? To the truth?
Ercole represents an awareness of reality, an awareness which feeds the dream, thanks to a feeling of love. At first, as the elderly couple walk hand in hand along the bridge, it seems as if Estia is protecting the smaller Ercole, and not the other way around. But the lines and images which follow make it clear that the exact opposite is true. Ercole is the guardian and protector of Estia: Ercole is the guardian and protector of Estia's "dream". A revealing detail is his worried request to his wife to be careful as she crosses the Tiber. Another telling detail is his plea to the bully, made as he stifles his growing irritation, to keep from destroying his wife's dream. All of Ercole's strength comes from the awesome size of his feelings of love, protectiveness and tenderness towards Estia. It is his duty to protect his wife and to maintain that loving deception, and so he makes believe he is fishing every Friday, while instead he buys, every Friday, a pair of tiny fish from the fish stand. Ercole gives the impression of taking on the role of priest and keeper of the sacred aura of the past, in contrast to the neglect and ignorance of the present.
Er Ricotta represents the third and lowest level, which contains the vulgarity, bitterness and brutality of day-to-day living. With his personality underscored by his clothing, his earring and his pierced nose, the hood bullies his way into Ercole's life in order to destroy his dream. The shot taken from the point of view of "er Ricotta", where we find him breathing down Ercole's neck, together with the verbal outburst of insults, all amount to an attack on Ercole's feelings. The bully personifies the nitty-gritty universe of vulgarity. Indeed, he seems to exemplify the tawdry spectacle available on a daily basis, multiplied by the mass media in a world consisting of nothing but aggression and an absence of values. If Ercole is value, then "er Ricotta" is anti-value ; if Ercole is the guardian of the dream, then "er Ricotta" is its menacing destroyer. The contrast defies all resolution, as is made clear by Ercole's disheartened line: "Ricò, you'll never understand."
The young couple represents the continuity of the sentiment of love. The choice of the two young people, the tall boy and the rather short girl (the opposite of Ercole and Estia) seems designed to emphasize that love and tenderness between a man and woman do not depend on physical height or age. Through this casting, the director announces his optimistic outlook on humanity. He seems to be telling the average member of the audience that, apart from the day-to-day brutality, the sentiment of love will withstand all attacks, perversion and manipulation. The world of young people cannot simply be lumped under the same category as "er Ricotta". A thin line runs from the tenderness of Ercole and Estia to that of the two young people. The line spoken by the boy to the girl after they have glanced knowingly at the elderly couple walking away hand-in-hand is proof of this continuity: "Giorgia, did you see how sweet they are!" It's the same line Estia pronounces in describing them. Using this masterful invention, the director emphasizes the continuity of the feeling of love in every generation.
The deception inspired by the love of Ercole for Estia must not only withstand the onslaught of "er" Ricotta's brutality, but also the pressure of two oppressive elements, one audio and the other visual: the throbbing noise of the automobile traffic and the plastic bag fished out of the Tiber by Ercole. The director frames the episode between these two negative extremes, set in terms of ecological concern and the need to safeguard the vital dimensions of the City and of Nature. The result is an appeal to release the day-to-day lives of citizens from the harsh, unrelenting monster represented by traffic, which threatens not only the lungs but, quite often, the citizens' basic ability to move about. Such a situation makes it impossible to benefit from the beauty of sites, from the historical memory of monuments and from the vital spaces which come to represent a cultural treasure. The plastic bag fished out of the Tiber gives occasion for a cry of pain against the polluted state of the river, which could be brought back to life not only as a route of water-borne transportation, but also as a biological entity providing a natural ecosystem of flora and fauna set within the heart of the City. The director utilizes these two underlying elements, the audio and visual threats to the sentiments of Ercole and Estia, to represent the negative symbols of a modern way of life which destroys the values of mutual tolerance : a dilemma which the metropolitan man of the third millennium must come to grips with. Who, as a pedestrian, has not daily been forced to face the traffic of Rome? Who, while walking along the riverside drives, has not noticed, washed up along the river banks or floating on the surface of the water, plastic objects which dessecrate the environment?
In framing all of the camera shots, the director has paid heed to the esthetic coordinates, whether his end choice was the product of a rational decision or the result of a natural leaning towards a particular artistic taste. Especially in the case of the long shots, there is a method of composition in which the sky, the greenery and the constructions become a harmonious unit, forming a chromatic sequence reminiscent of the paintings of the Roman School. The clear, pastel-shaded sky, whose effect is heightened by the contrast with the few clouds, fully expresses the fresh innocence of the feelings of the two couples, at what amounts to a Springtime in their lives, regardless of their ages or social conditions. In this respect, the camera shot of the San Michele a Ripa building proves to be a masterly touch, as the warm color of the "Palazzo", made all the more intense by the Sun's rays, easily transfers to the viewer the warmth and the tenderness of the sentiments involved. Finally, to the right of the first and last camera shot, we see the soothing presence of the wild yellow daisies. The shot taken from Estia's point of view and the full shot of Ercole as he walks down to the river bank, resemble two paintings by Ottone Rosai. Finally, a deeply emotional note is struck by the gull who flies above the vegetation of the Tiber and the arches of the Ponte Sublicio bridge, symbolising freedom.
The sound track is perfectly in keeping with the images and the message of the film: a hit by the group Frankie Goes to Hollywood, "The Power of Love". The music and the words seem to have been composed twenty years ago just for Ercole and Estia.
The director of this short film has demonstrated not only that a complete story can be told with just a few minutes of film, but also that this story can take on a universal significance. Worthy of note is the unmistakable contrast between this film and movies today, whose subjects are all so full of trash, pulp and gratuitous violence. At the same time, however, this work steers well clear of rhetorical, flacid sentimentality. Seen in this perspective, the film is lean and incisive, without any idle moments. Emphasis should be given to the excellent casting, especially in the part of Ercole, whose waddling gait as he walks home exudes the same poetry as Chaplin's character. Ercole is a contemporary tramp!
Mauro Lorenzi (e-mail malory@tin.it)