On the remastered Palombella Rossa, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chlorine

                             Chronicle of a Chlorinated Revolution

 (On the remastered Palombella Rossa, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chlorine)

There are cinematic landscapes that stay with you forever: Antonioni’s fog in Ferrara, Fellini’s Rimini, Moretti’s Vespa circling through Trastevere. 

And then there is Palombella Rossa, which courageously imprisons us for two hours inside a public swimming pool—a baptism not of fire, but of chlorine.

Nanni Moretti, the prophet of Roman neuroses, here becomes the lifeguard of lost ideals. 

His protagonist, a communist with convenient amnesia, is forced to rediscover the meaning of politics while gasping for breath in between water polo timeouts. 

The question hovers like steam over the pool: is comunism a system of ideas or a badly refereed amateur match?

Moretti, of course, answers by showing us neither. 

Instead, we receive a tsunami of absurd lines shouted across the echoing tiles: “The Party must be like a counterattack!” “Foul play is the dialectical engine of history!” “Pass me the ball, comrade!” 

These fragments swirl in the chlorinated fog, mixing Marx with Marco Polo.

One must admire the perversity. 

At a time when cinema still offered the luxury of Roman terraces, Vespa rides, and languid cappuccino comedies, Moretti drags us into an aquatic nightmare. 

Ninety-eight percent of the film is shot in the pool complex, where the extras scream as if possessed, a chorus of hysteria resembling both political assemblies and children’s swimming lessons.

Is this a satire of ideology? 

A glorification of sportsmen’s bodies? 

A hymn to the futility of dialectics in the face of a referee’s whistle?

 No one knows. 

The paradox is perfect: Moretti critiques politics by drowning it in a chlorine bath, transforming Marx into a floating rubber buoy.

Today, in its remastered state, Palombella Rossa gleams even more absurdly. 

The improved image quality allows us to study every drop of sweat and pool water, every twitch of Moretti’s face as he tries to convince us that amateur water polo can carry the allegorical weight of an epoch. 

Does it succeed? 

Perhaps in 1989, when dadaistic dialogues and fractured subjectivities still passed for radical experimentation. 

In 2025, it feels more like an interminable rehearsal of absurd slogans shouted through a megaphone in a sauna.

And yet, one must confess: the film fascinates precisely because it fails so extravagantly. 

It is a monument to boredom elevated into political allegory, a heroic attempt to turn chlorine into ideology. 

Moretti forces us to witness the slow drowning of utopia—and he makes sure we too leave the theater gasping for oxygen.

So what remains, after all the fouls, the whistles, the forgotten ideals? 

Perhaps only this: that revolutions, like water polo matches, are decided less by brains than by lung capacity.

By Giulia Dobre

Sept.22nd, 2025,Paris

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SIRAT: A Rave in the Labyrinth

                  SIRAT, or How to Rave in the Face of Death

Ah, Cannes, that great lottery of taste. 

This year the Jury Prize went to SIRAT, a film that takes on nothing less than the ephemerality of life and the absurdity of death. 

Noble, yes. Necessary, even. 

So what’s the story of SIRAT? 

Well, “story” might be too generous a word. 

Imagine this: a group of beautiful thirty-somethings, allergic to work and sobriety, decide that the only way to confront the terrifying absurdity of death is… to party harder. 

They set off on a psychedelic odyssey through the deserts of Northern Africa, taking “bio” drugs (because chemicals are sooo last century) while dancing like their life insurance depends on it.

Somewhere in the middle of this eternal rave, the Minotaur appears—yes, a literal Minotaur, because nothing says “meaning of life” like Greek mythology crashing your techno set. 

Played by the immense Sergi López, he alone seems aware that this labyrinth of strobe lights and sweaty hugs could actually be about something. He is looking for his daughter and grabs on to the only bit of family that remained to him.

The others? Mostly busy staring at the sky, kissing each other’s foreheads, and muttering lines so clumsy they make fortune cookies sound like Shakespeare.

The message? Life is short, death is absurd, so ditch responsibility, skip society, and dance barefoot in glitter until the end arrives. 

A philosophy that sounds thrilling at 2 a.m.—slightly less so the next morning when your rent is due.

Socrates must be spinning in his grave, though admittedly he might have enjoyed the light show.

Visually, it’s a treat. 

The cinematography is gorgeous, the camera so fluid it almost dances, the images poetic enough to make Instagram jealous. For a few moments, you feel like you’re floating in a golden dream. 

And then someone speaks. 

The poor non-professional actors, required to deliver only a handful of lines, manage to treat each word like an Olympic hurdle. 

It’s painful, but also—ironically—almost in theme: nothing lasts, not even coherent dialogue.

Sergi López, what a gift. 

Where the others stumble, he roars. 

Where the film flirts with superficiality, he digs deep. 

His presence is immense, magnetic, unforgettable. 

He doesn’t just act; he rescues the entire enterprise from collapsing under its own strobe lights.

  SIRAT will fade, but Sergi will stay with you.

But the real show came at the Q&A at the MK2 Quai de Seine in Paris.

The director, asked the most basic question—why the title “SIRAT”?—embarked on an odyssey of awkwardness. 

For context: “Sirat” in Islamic tradition refers to the bridge of judgment, stretched perilously thin between heaven and hell, the path of ultimate destiny. A title dripping with philosophical weight, perfect for a film about life and death. 

And the director’s explanation? He chose it because...it “sounded melodious.” That’s it. The bridge of eternity reduced to a catchy jingle. 

One imagines Dante rolling his eyes in the seventh circle.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team stumbled on stage, visibly high or drunk, and turned the discussion into a half-slurred cocktail of leftist slogans and anti-Israel declarations.

 The audience’s mild goodwill evaporated like spilled prosecco. 

The aftertaste was less cinéma vérité than karaoke politique.

In the end, SIRAT is like a festival night you only half-remember: flashes of beauty, lots of noise, a lingering headache, and one incredible performer you’ll never forget. 

The rave fades, but Sergi López—immense as always—remains.

By Giulia Dobre

in Montpellier

Chronicle of Mirros No3 (Petzhold’s Domestic Opera of Nothingness)

 Mirros No3, or How to Die of Drama Without Really Dying

If cinema is a mirror held up to life, then Mirros No3 is more like one of those mirrors in a faded provincial carnival: warped, wobbling, leaving you with the faint suspicion that the operator ran off with your ticket money.

Petzhold’s Mirros No3 arrives wrapped in mystery. The title alone suggests labyrinths of reflections, terrible secrets, perhaps a gothic chamber where truth fractures like glass.

 One enters the cinema braced for horror, for scandal, for something so dirty that it will never wash out.

And then… we get a family drama.

 Yes, there is a death, and yes, there is trauma—but Petzhold treats these like a stern schoolteacher who confiscates the candy just before recess. 

The scandal never arrives. Instead, we sit at the table of grief with relatives who speak in ellipses, drink mineral water with great intensity, and stare at each other as if hypnotized by Ikea lamps.

The main feast is, of course, Barbara Auer. A very fine actress who here seems guided by acting direction from the school of “More! Louder! Pretend you are Medea even when asking for the TV remote!” 

She storms and trembles with the force of a Wagner soprano, bringing operatic fury to a role that demands, at most, a resigned sigh. 

The effect is so theatrical that one half-expects surtitles to appear at the bottom of the screen.

 Out of place? Out of orbit. It’s not acting—it’s a cosmic event.

And then hovering like a cinematic law of gravity: Paula Beer. 

She appears once again, as she does in approximately 75% of all German productions. Beer has become the universal plug-in actress for every female character between 18 and 80.

 Daughter? Beer. Mother? Beer. Grandmother with arthritis and a secret garden? Beer with a shawl. She is omnipresent, the patron saint of German melancholy.

In Mirros No3, she floats through the frames like wallpaper—beautiful wallpaper, yes, but wallpaper all the same.

So what do we get when you mix Auer’s thunderclap melodrama with Beer’s inevitable ubiquity and Petzhold’s barren script?

 A film that promises a dirty secret and delivers instead a family melodrama reheated from last week’s leftovers. A death, a trauma, a table covered in tense silences—and acting so overwrought it practically shakes the projector.

In the end, Mirros No3 is less a movie than a mirror held up to German cinema itself: cracked, theatrical, omnipresently Beer-flavored, and barren of scandal.

 You expect sin and skeletons, and you walk away with tepid grief in porcelain cups. 

Funky, yes. 

Amusing, accidentally so.

BY Giulia Dobre