In Gabriele Mainetti’s darkly poignant tale, circus performers with superpowers fight the Nazis. At last year’s Venice Film Festival, the film won five awards in the main competition. We tell how the Italian director reimagines World War II in a fantasy vein and offers a vivid plot from an alternate history.
There have been quite a few superheroes spotted on the fields of world wars in recent years. Magneto from X-Men owes his power to his childhood spent in a concentration camp. Amazon Wonder Woman left her magical land in World War I to prevent people from inventing chemical weapons never before seen. Let’s not forget that the frail lad Steve Rogers, who transformed himself into Captain America, also toured with charity concerts and collected donations for the war effort in the early years of the war. By the way, it was in Italy in 1943 that he goes straight from the stage to the real war to save a friend. Which means that Captain America could well have crossed paths with another troupe that was forced to cease its concert activities – Uncle Israel’s traveling circus. It is with this fantastic foursome that the Italian-Belgian tale “Desperate Avengers” introduces audiences – dark and beautiful, like the best creations of Del Toro and Tim Burton.
Gabriele Mainetti’s new European blockbuster is a rare beast, capable of drawing a diverse audience to its screens. A participant in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival, it, on the one hand, sparkles with cinematic joys and references (from “The Wizard of Oz” to “Inglourious Basterds”), and on the other, does not forget its purely entertaining nature and skillfully keeps the spirit of the merry buffoonery, not letting the moralizing take over the show. Mainetti begins the tale of freaks in the midst of war as a circus performance. Here the young albino Cincho (Pietro Castellitto) fills the arena with fireflies, his gift for controlling insects, here the wild-beast-like Chewbacca Fulvio (Claudio Santamaria) bends his guns with a bestial roar and gallantly bows before the venerable audience, Here dwarf Mario (Giancarlo Martini) makes a merry clowning around with metal utensils, which attract like a magnet, and air acrobat Matilda (Aurora Giovinazzo) is a live battery, which easily fills bulbs with electric current. This magical interlude is interrupted by a sudden bomb that falls – the magic tent is destroyed, and the entire war-torn Rome becomes the new arena for the freak circus.
The four freaks, contrary to the canon, are not going to save the world or turn the tide of war at all. At first they want to go to America together with Israel, but their entertainer, along with all his savings, falls into the hands of the Nazis and is about to be sent to a concentration camp, just like other Jews. Then the troupe splits into two – Fulvio, along with Cincho and Mario, goes to find work in the beautiful Circus Berlin on the outskirts of the city, and Matilda, after an unpleasant encounter with a German patrol, finds herself in a partisan camp. The circus is run by six-fingered Franz (Franz Rogowski), who sees a future in drug tripping and performs Radiohead and Guns N`Roses hits to an amazed audience. The guerrillas proudly call themselves “Uvedevils” and clutch automatic weapons in place of their missing limbs. In short, the heroes find themselves among freaks just like them, but on different sides of the barricades. The war becomes an extension of the circus performance, a case of freaks on both sides, a huge, mesmerizing and bloody spectacle in the open air.
What’s most appealing about this inventive tale for adults is the freedom of imagination, uninhibited by censorship and children’s ratings. Italian superheroes are free to create any obscenity, to be freaks all the way: to make a bloody mess, to masturbate in the frame, to shoot themselves out of a gun and roll in the mud. They don’t let anybody forget that war is a vile and disgusting showdown with no room for nobility, no matter which side is right.
And unlike the Marvel and DC blockbusters, Gabriel Mainetti, following the great Fellini, fills the film with incredible characters. In Desperate Avengers, even the minor characters have a truly Fellinian charisma: from the boy with Down syndrome in the line of convoyed Jews to the hunchback partisan, from the unfortunate people with special features on whom Franz performs experiments worthy of Dr. Mengele to the random passerby who takes an infant from a young Jewish woman to save him from the concentration-camp hell. War is a bloody circus involving living people, not faceless masses of people. In Mainetti’s inventive marquee there are no extras, only personalities, and so all the guns in his circus hit the exact target.