Machismo, retro-chic, impeccable style and a bit of narcissism

A few days ago, a good biographical documentary premiered at the festival and in Serbia as a whole Dario Argento Panico, and in it one of the obviously carefully selected speakers is the famous filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, for Argent, the author of several unrepeatable films (for example, let's mention the following: Suspiria, Tenebre, Deep Red...) pointed out that this famous and truly special Italian filmmaker in his films always presents and does not explain. And by doing so, he creates quickly striking film worlds that the viewer unquestioningly believes, and on the way to that assessment, the author did not spend too much time convincing him that what he sees in the film story, full of bizarreness and enigmatic, somewhere, perhaps not so far away, really and it exists. Well, that could be a kind of general impression after a surprisingly high-quality biographical feature film Ferrari, as they say, a long-dreamed and delayed project that the famous director and film storyteller, but also one of the most brilliant stylists of even more contemporary American cinema, Michael Mann, chose to make. Well, even in the first days of his ninth decade of life and several decades of persistent work in the film industry, with a total score of more than 10 films that justified his reputation as an author of integrity and sophistication - The Jericho Mile, Thief, Manhunter, The heat, Haker...

Mann already points to the first and perhaps the most important test - here he managed to create a thoroughly reviewed and full-blooded repertory, and at the same time sufficiently less conventional film about an essentially unconventional personality, and only such films deserve to be in the spotlight of biographical films. story. The screenplay is based on a decades-old biography of Enzo Ferrari by Brock Yates, with the focus of Mann's film story being intelligently limited by the time frame, which essentially spans only three months of the restless spirit's biography. To be as precise as possible and at the same time economical - Manov Ferrari certainly includes three revolutionary and exciting months during 1957, during which Enzo Ferrari was forced to register victories on two equally important plans: on the private side, where he lives in an open marriage, the openness of which did not actually reflect the real needs and wishes of the actors, and obviously insufficiently rooted bargains, both professionally, at a time when debts were piling up, and reputation and prestige in relation to competitors was not in sight. Ferrari's marriage was clearly crunching its last days and the atoms of strength and the mutual desire of the actors to remain in that vortex of essential vagueness, and all this after a huge family tragedy, which would have swept away the spouses and made them much more loyal to each other, while the dream of dominance in the sphere of car racing stumbled under the weight of bukagi in the form of weak sales of cars for general and everyday use, without which there could not even be a tangible basis for spending extravaganzas, which expensive car races are, not only in that plusquamperfect. Let's add to that the side of the plot that concerns the ever-present danger that Ferrari's secret, admittedly, informal marriage with a much younger woman, with whom he had, say, a ten-year-old son at that time, will become a trigger for public scandal in the nevertheless to a considerable extent claustrophobic Modena (where, to mention that, a huge part of this film was shot).

Of course, this kind of dramaturgical architectonics does not represent any innovation, we have seen it in several cases, of course with one or the other, noteworthy or perhaps even negligible final achievements, and it is one part of the proven and effective tool of Hollywood and new Hollywood storytellers - to provide the audience with a limited sample that it has the potential to present the full measure of unusualness, intrigue and illustrativeness of someone's life through an episode or two. The good thing is that Michael Mann (1943) also shows an enviable measure of tact and certainty, and his Ferrari it easily crosses those quite a few steps that divide the spheres of predictability and generality on the one hand, and sufficient atypicality on the other. It should be emphasized that it was not a starting point that guaranteed a sure hit on the target in that aspect, especially since (when it is broken down in the viewer's mind into a few essential items) the character of Enzo Ferrari nevertheless becomes a typical example of a courageous alpha male who, at first unfavorable life and other circumstances, perhaps fatefully destined for ultimate success, which is not certain, nor should it be seen as a meritocratic gift, where success follows only those who on their own the path of struggle, evolution and, why not, self-emancipation, show enough perseverance, courage and vulnerability. On the other hand, here too Mann was on his own, because Enzo Ferrari, regardless of the fact that before Mann's narrative and above all filmic visor comes from the dimension of reality, evokes strong associations with typical, perhaps even completely typical Mann's male "heroes". and there is plenty of evidence for that in a sample of almost five decades of Mann's filmmaking. Rome Ferrari we will easily find it in the already mentioned one A thief, but also much later - in The Last of the Mohicans i Ali (another of Mann's sovereign works in the field of film biopics), as well as in Hacker, a healthy and true example of Mann's skill to reach from the darkness of generality to the always welcome, and in fact very deceptive particularity, necessarily accompanied, somewhat contradictory, by a touch of universality, evident in all of Mann's film stories, from his brilliant television work The Jericho Mile, so here it is until these days and years.

photo: promo

Although it might appear that Ferrari as a whole, similar to Cameron's Titanic and the sinking segment of that ship at the end of the film, there is a certain and definitely expensive excuse to bring to the big screen and before the eyes of the audience the amazingly executed scenes of the terrible accident that happened during that crucial race for victory and primacy over the ever-vigilant and equally combative competition, Man manages to win in that dimension as well, so that obviously focal point of the entire film eventually becomes an integral part of the whole, and it is one of the cinematic of the most successful sequences on the sample of last year's production of a more ambitious and repertory specific film. true, Ferrari could have been less narrated and structured in detail in parts, it is true, the character of the "newer" wife to a certain extent "hangs" in relation to the rest of the story, it is true, the decision to have the actors speak semantically and grammatically precise and correct English with targeted English is questionable accents, but all that still remains in the shadow of the overall impression that this is a very good work by a deserving veteran, while Ferrari for the most part, it is dynamically performed and given in a youthful way (with, of course, the impression that dynamism dominates as expected in the parts of the story that concern the race itself and the small digressions connected with it). On top of all that, unlike the recent one Houses of Gucci Ridley Scott, Adam Driver in the title role at Man justifies the trust that the people there of expertise and power place in him regarding the potential to present the main (male) role, and on the visual level Ferrari fully satisfies - not only on account of the almost always effective retro-chic, but also on account of the "tone" and texture of the film image, here as a kind of equivalent to the postcards of the time with a more emphasized and saturated color, with quite a few details from the domain of ambitious mise-en-scène and in the depth of the frame . And that would not be all - Man is Ferrari "forged" another ode to machismo, which is often found in rehearsals and on a bumpy road full of sharp bends and other curves, and this necessarily brings to mind Man's unconvincing counterparts/contemporaries here, with the sad assessment that the veterans who are still working here and create in the field of film mostly offer cerebral works of extremely questionable raison d'etre. is in such a state of affairs in those cases still there - in front of the screen or (which is certainly always preferable from the point of view of true film buffs) the big screen.