SENTIERI SELVAGGI (del 09/07/2007)
( www.sentieriselvaggi.it/articolo.asp?sez0=2&sez1=164&art=22179 )

Underworld: “Nazareno”, di Varo Venturi

Rome has never been so scary. Dreadful, livid, tormenting, unspeakable, like the perfect, self consistent world in which Nazareno merges us from the very first scenes.
Human, too human: a few characters (played by non professional actors) that are too real, caught in the middle of their existences, in apparently meaningless moments that make their souls palpable.
“Pasolinian” in their linearity without a cause, in their instantaneous (accidental) sorrows, happiness, indifference.

The unknown underworld of the metropolis, the desperate depth of the charachters kick away the alleged thrills of any “Romanzo Criminale” (Crime Novel) the frenetic shooting and editing leave the viewer with no way to escape: if you choose to watch you get inside those lives, those situations, cages and attempts to escape; the only way not to get involved is to turn away your sight.
Venturi realizes one of those movies that, through a mysterious jump, achives the miracle of subliming reality on a screen; and brings into question that thin fracture, that we don’t usually know how to identify, between the real and the un-real.

This is quite much for a film debut, rough and complete, open and solved.
The spirituality remains in the background, “alienated”, although it’s the basic theme of the film: at the end it results as an ensemble of inserts, but maybe this is the way  the charachters live their own personal search for infinity.

Also the elements that drive the plot, “case in the safe”, or “invisible puppeteers” formulas,  remain quite unclear, leading continuosly to the mind edges, to the borders of the sight, at the limit of understanding; like if these two worlds, upper and lower, deprivation and excess, wealth and impotence, were structured to never meet, unless at an unbearable charge.

The first movie by Varo Venturi on one side displays a documentary style, of such a rare, immediate intensity, without tricks or winks, most of all in the pictorial scenes shot in internal and in the dialogues that introduce the characters; on the other side sudden oniric, delirious splinters break in, maybe naïve, but never incoherent.

They are not only the subjective shots, the dialogues, the sharp script of a story in which the “meaning” continuosly slips away, that make the value of this movie. Exactly as if the reality that the director chose to represent and the making of the “film” magically became (have become) one thing, forever.

Annarita Guidi

35mm
( www.35mm.it/film/scheda.jsp?idFilm=36926 )

Recensioni

“Nazareno”: Strong, raw, sincere.

A miracle. This is how to summarize “Nazareno”, Varo Venturi’s first feature film. The movie is studded with various references to the Holy Scriptures, to the opposition between good and evil, night and day, but most of all an apocalyptic tension that impends over the characters. A miracle is also bringing to life a movie that cost only 100.000 Euros and had a four years lasting gestation.
Varo Venturi insinuates, hits on  the hip, but without showing clearly his thought, leaving the interpretation to the audience. Performed mainly by non-professional actors, “Nazareno” is inspired by the the real life of its protagonist, Nazzareno Bomba, who provides an outstanding cinematographic debut. Free from technical superstructures and with atmospheres that reminds of Scorsese’s “Mean Streets”, this work moves through dark tones, close ups recalling Caravaggio’s best, and the braveness of proposing a tough, hard but also terribly sincere storytelling. Venturi choses to develope themes that are far more complex than the usual scope of Italian cinema. Such a movie would have had a better fate in other countries, with a high profile production in the background and a fair budget. This didn’t happen, but the movie will hit the theatres anyway. A must and a pleasure to see.

Francesco Therese

SKY CINEMA

WEEKEND AT THE MOVIES

A film debut also in our country: Nazareno, small film by Varo Venturi, director, writer and producer of an unbelievable true story: Nazzareno Bomba (playing almost himself), lovely caring nurse of old people by day and puncher for illegal debt-collection by night. A story that proves to be original and unbelievable, spiritual and violent.

CINECITTA’ NEWS (del 26/6/2007)
( http://news.cinecitta.com/dossier/dossier.asp?id=6659 )

NAZARENO: Rome and occult powers

A heterogeneous Rome enveloped in new religious cults and overshadowed by a silent power is the protagonist of Nazareno, an independent feature by first time filmmaker Varo Venturi. In the decadent suburbs ordinary lives intertwine in the search for spirituality while going on with their daily business. The events unravel with unexpected and rapid turns until they reach the high powers that play with the lives of mere mortals who happen to come into contact with it…

A cast of non professional actors stars in the cast of this low budget, completely self produced movie that is inspired by real events that have hastily surfaced into mainstream media. News such as the Uranium 235 handling in Rome or that of a alleged priest at the helm of a Islamic terrorist organization that frequents the Vatican quarters.
Nazzareno Bomba is the protagonist and inspirer of this film, in which he portrays in an exceedingly convincing manner his own life story: a loving caretaker during the day and a violent debt collector by night.

… a constant shifting between earthly and spiritual aspirations, violence and redemption is finally summoned up in a quote by Friderich Nietzche by the Mephisto -like character Elia Da Re: “if you’ll become like children you shall inherit the kingdom of Heaven, but we have become man and therefore want the kingdom of the Earth”.

Carmen Diotaiuti

IL MANIFESTO   (del 6 luglio 2007)

The via crucis of Nazareno in Rome, bitter city.

The discovery of Nazareno, Varo Venturi’s debut, is Nazzareno Bomba, a strong bodily presence that become cinema under his direction, as one can rarely see.
Venturi, music and filming talent (his first short Cosmos Hotel awarded the prize at Sacher ’97) uses film references from Fellini to Risi and Spielberg as rough material for the background of Nazareno’s story.  Nazareno is a proletarian, ex-addicted man that, come out of the prison, during the day takes care of disabled old people as a nurse for a catholic association and in the night he is involved in violent business (…).

Overabundance marks the story: traffic in arms, ethnic rapes, islamic terrorism, new business frontiers, dark involvments of Vatican’s figures, club privé, naturist and esotheric sects. But all that takes part of Roma life, real or printed: it would be sufficient to read newspapers or to listen to the basic noise of the city (…).

… a true sadness perfectly described makes the film really thick and show how the great masters’ time has gone. There is no more the “dolce vita” Rome or the one of “usual unidentified” either, but Pasolini is always among us. Our time is as far away from American dreams as the alien spaceship that arrives in the night suburbs like “clouse encounters”. Deusfilm production. 

Silvana Silvestri

ANSA  (del 26 giugno 2007)

Cinema:  Nazareno, spirituality mixes thriller and video game

Rome, June 26th.  A non professional actor plays the main lead in  this urban thriller that addresses in a mix of genres the issue of  spirituality.  Such is the stylistic choice of first-time director  Varo Venturi’s feature “Nazareno” the super-independent” production,  as the authors like to call it, to be released nationwide on June  28th.  Venturi whose ancestors include Pope Pius II, plays with  religion, though in a provocative way,  to depict his movie with an  almost entirely non professional cast.

Musician and director of several shorts, Venturi shoots mostly at  night in a Rome full of surreal characters with a style that is a  crossover between a Music Video and a Videogame.  All sorts of genres  and issues are addressed from religious iconography to thriller,  pseudo-politic, documentary and Italian style comedy to Pasolinian  cinema.  The protagonist is modeled after his exceptional interpreter, Nazzareno Bomba, a male nurse in real life.

The low budget of the movie, which cost less than 100.000 Euros and  did not receive any funding from the government, has already  attracted more than 20.000 viewers nationwide.  Mr. Venturi is  already at work on a much more ambitious project:  “ It’ll be a  medieval Road Movie set in 1460 with three protagonists who depart  from Rome to embark in a long journey – the director said – It will  still deal with religion but magic will play an important role.  At 
the moment we are dealing with various European and U.S. companies  and plan to start pre-production by year-end”.

IL TEMPO (domenica 29 luglio 2007)

«Nazareno» by director Varo Venturi

The ecclesiastic Rome rivisited in a livid nightly thriller.

…the director clears the way to the rift real/unreal in his first work, documentary style, where spirituality stays always visibile, like it was an actual way for the characters to look into infinite throughtout restricted earthly spaces. The narrative cue is the recovery of a briefcase containing important and misterious documents purloined by roman mafia. Then the plot plunges in a conflict of contrasts: between power and impotence, abuses and absences, a succession of dreamy and raving references.
After a disperate flight from “special” security forces, the anti-heroe of the film should face his own redeeming instict in a city (Rome) controlled from “the top”, in the shade of eastern go-getting mafia and mysterious islamic terrorists. A surreal initiatory path that will lead the protagonist to an unforeseeable redemption.

Dina D’Isa

Cinema Department  (CMT) University of Pisa

THE SHADOW OF ROME

“Nazareno”, by Varo Venturi

Varo Venturi’s first feature film has the rare courage to hold a clear opinion on cinema: a low budget movie, proud of being an independent production, the movie is a coral work achieved through a group of non-professional actors, who play themselves in a complex and ironical game of mirrors. The actors are written in a dramatic structure of an archetypical genre; the protagonist is Rome, a stratified vertical city with many faces, a daedalus of streets, routes, lives that unfold from the suburbs to the big palaces of power. Its domes and vaults appear constantly and heavily unloading the burden of their weight on the human fabric that lives at the level of the "street". Rome unravels its darkest shadow, looking for a difficult and perhaps impossible balance between two worlds. On the one side, there is the inescapable "work" of a secular silent and occult power, on the other, the destinies of a social fabric, abandoned to the chaos of its own basic needs and over-stimulated by a multicultural communication, that with its infinite ramifications seems rather to suggest a possible but unlikely path of rise and liberation.
Nazzareno Bomba, a nurse that performs his debut as lead actor, undertakes with incredible confidence the challenge of a feature film shaped entirely on his strong bodily presence on the screen and his intense existential drama. Extraordinary non-professional actors join Bomba in the film; an improvised crew of "usual unidentified", who play with their characters, as if they were lenses that distort their real life experiences. The mafia and terrorist groups play on the background, directed in the shadow by the mysterious lawyer Elia Da Re, performed by the director himself, and in the end, the story portraits in an extremely concrete way the shameless traffic of weapons of mass destruction.  

Nazareno carries out a suffered, initiatory path. He looks for a possibile balance between the violence of his law of the streets, as beater and mercenary, and the violence that his destiny continuously impose on him.
That’s why Nazareno is first of all, in search of Redemption, as well as the characters around him.
The stakes are high, both on the stylistic and on the aesthetic level. On the one side, Varo Venturi follows the poetics of the great masters’ italian neorealism, Pasolini above all, when he chooses the hyper-realism of “life caught unawares”. But it joins up with hyper-kinetic action sequences, car chases and shootings realized through manifold shots that are similar to the most audacious Hollywood blockbusters. On the other side the director decides to manage a very complex and ambitious material (the screenplay is written by the director with Luisa Maria Fusconi) inside a little movie totally self-produced and self-distributed. This movie goes in the direction of a “technological neo-realism”, by making the most of the crew and of the light, flexible equipment. The digital camera, dipped in an almost endless dark, breaks up the eye in many points of view, loosening from any spacial bounds and generating an open-ended range of shots. This endless series has been afterwards harmonized throughout an accurate post-production work, which enabled images to be almost entirely “painted”.
The result is the kaleidoscopic and violent picture of Rome, the shadow capital of a silent and underground power, which unmercifully plays with the lives of its inhabitants and passers-by.

Dott. A. Romagnoli, PhD