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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