The Shrill Seekers: De Angelis Turns to Comedic Caricature
For his latest venture, The Fire Within You, Edoardo De Angelis seems to be employing the idiom, ‘you can take the Napolitano out of Naples but you can’t take Naples out of the Napolitano.’ Perhaps it’s his intention to convey incredibly broad, overblown stereotyping with a cohort of dysfunctional family members gathering in Milan one increasingly protracted, ultimately dreadful Christmas Eve for some customary emotional bloodletting, and the lavish, exaggerated behaviors on display might indeed entertain fans of nonsensical, operatic gesturing. Unfortunately, there’s not one moment of emotional authenticity in what feels like an increasingly desperate attempt to squeeze some sort of pathos from all the clawing and caterwauling exchanged by a clutch of one-dimensional characters who make questionable decisions.
It’s Christmas Eve and Antonio (Lino Musella) is hosting a dinner for his extended family at his home in Milan. His mother Angela (Vanessa Scalera) has arrived like a hurricane from Naples, bitter and resentful, seemingly hellbent on sucking up all the energy as she prepares a feast for a family who cannot wait for her to leave. Antonio’s wife Benedetta (Elena Radonicich) might be on the verge of leaving her husband, while their two teenage children seem blissfully detached from the misery of their parents. Antonio’s sister Paola (Ivana Lotito) is resentful of Angela’s favoring of her brother. Angela also pines endlessly about her estrangement from another daughter who refuses to speak to her. When a famous author (Tommaso Ragno) decides to drop by, disaster seems imminent.
For those addicted to overblown drama, there are a legion of reality television shows which somehow feel better emotionally regulated than what De Angelis has concocted. His characters make about as much sense as a flock of ornery, squawking birds trying to quell the boredom of imprisonment through white noise. Perhaps it’s because De Angelis isn’t generally used to working with a scenario that, on the surface, is rather mundane. He tends to build narratives framed by dramatic flourishes, like conjoined twins (Indivisible, 2016), child trafficking (The Vice of Hope, 2018) or a submarine captain saving endangered enemy soldiers (Comandante, 2023). Along with his co-scribes Ilaria Macchia (The Wait, 2015) and Franscesco Piccolo (Bellocchio’s excellent The Traitor, 2019), De Angelis sees fit to start out at fever pitch and then remain at this level for the entire running time of the film. The smartest character is the ‘capo,’ a castrated rooster designated for Christmas Day dinner, evading his impending doom (though, unfortunately, he too is used for cheap laughs).
What’s frustrating is the potential lurking in the depths and had this been scaled back to reflect at least one person having a real human experience, perhaps some emotional investment could have been obtained. An immediate distraction is the strange casting. The blazing star of the production (coming in so hot she scuttles the whole endeavor, capsizing the narrative like a torpedo) is Vanessa Scalera, who is not yet even fifty years of age (and only three years older than Lino Musella in real life). While she’s made out to be a bleary drunk with raccoon eyes, the actors cast as her children need to be younger for this to make sense. As is, Scalera’s casting is about as realistic as Vicki Lawrence from “Mama’s Family.” As Angela, she is sometimes entertaining with her egregious, bitchy quips and constant griping, but she’s an alcoholic clown, a strong ingredient the narrative needs much less of as she blots out absolutely everything else like a nuclear apocalypse. One can see the potential of the character, and a performer like Anna Magnani would have known just how to moderate this woman’s brittle excessiveness. Instead, Angela feels like a hopped up version of Sylvia Sidney in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988).
The heartache of family gatherings for ceremonies or holidays is certainly a subgenre unto itself, but the difficulty is finding a way out of the tropes. Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays (1995) balances these tropes well enough, but Scalera’s performance suggests this is a prologue to Flowers in the Attic (1987). De Angelis isn’t alone in this kind of cringeworthy misstep. The calibration between his characters are as disjointed as the recent Christophe Honore film Orange Flavored Wedding.
As could be expected, there is a third act tragedy demanding a final act of profundity, but De Angelis doesn’t come anywhere close to earning this. Furious, hysterical fall-outs are immediately resolved thanks to the kind of crisis where all has to be forgiven to ensure catharsis and resolution. But most will likely prefer the perspective of the troubled chicken and desire to take a similar risk in jumping out the window, or any aperture, to escape the constant bickering and yammering about absolutely nothing interesting.
Reviewed on September 9th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – In Competition. 94 Minutes.
★½/☆☆☆☆☆
