Superb story of revelations with dreamlike detours, Il Miracolo, broadcast in winter 2019 on Arte, was revived by the channel on its platform Arte.tv. A boon.
The Italian writer Niccolò Ammaniti, awarded for his novels I am not afraid (2001) and As God wants it (2007), succeeded in exfiltrating the incisive glance which he poses on the contemporary Italian society, to make it pass from paper to the small screen, with an unusual mastery for a first try. In Il Miracolo (The Miracle), unearthed by Arte and made available on its platform since the end of January, Ammaniti, who is part of a generation of writers accustomed to garnishing its meat language with pop culture, delivers a dense, original story. and ambitious on the springs of the invisible, the unexplained. When the failures of the political and spiritual dimensions of the religious are evident, when the vital force of science and reason vacillates, the strange plasma which keeps humans in suspension and in connection leaves the field open to their self-destructive concerns. The social body, like the biological body, no longer holds. Il Miracolo in his ample, astounding, patient story, auscultates the wounds of absence, silence and emptiness.
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The Italian writer Niccolò Ammaniti, awarded for his novels I am not afraid (2001) and As God wants it (2007), succeeded in exfiltrating the incisive glance which he poses on the contemporary Italian society, to make it pass from paper to the small screen, with an unusual mastery for a first try. In Il Miracolo (The Miracle), unearthed by Arte and made available on its platform since the end of January, Ammaniti, who is part of a generation of writers accustomed to garnishing its meat language with pop culture, delivers a dense, original story. and ambitious on the springs of the invisible, the unexplained. When the failures of the political and spiritual dimensions of the religious are evident, when the vital force of science and reason vacillates, the strange plasma which keeps humans in suspension and in connection leaves the field open to their self-destructive concerns. The social body, like the biological body, no longer holds. Il Miracolo in his ample, astounding, patient story, auscultates the wounds of absence, silence and emptiness. During a tense raid on the lair of a Calabrian mafia godfather, the police discover a plastic Madonna crying profusely tears of blood. Placed in secrecy, the statuette and its purple river will put all the characters, believers or not, face to face with the inexplicable and upset their intimate, social and public life, while Italy is plunged into a heated debate on exit from the European economic area. Without necessarily disqualifying the Christian context of the miraculous stories, born in late Antiquity and reactivated spectacularly in the 19th century, accompanied by a critical examination on the part of a Catholic Church which intended to keep control of its backyard, Niccolò Ammaniti uses it as a springboard to tell something else. At certain extremes, Il Miracolo recalls The Leftovers in the use of the unexplained, of an allegorical form pushed, sudden of its manifestation, doomed to trigger doubts and questions among the protagonists, to operate the first cracks in traditional structures, individual breastplates and collective ramparts. First in a roped party caught in a headwind, Prime Minister Fabrizio Pietromarchi, at the initiative of the referendum for leaving Europe, falters in the face of pressure from economic circles and family demons walled up for too long. To make matters worse, the networks ignite about a slap inflicted by his lonely wife, the aptly named Sole, on his children. Which escape in morbid games, remained under the sole care of a lunar nanny. While General Votta, a figure of rectitude and serenity, investigates the origins of the statue, extensive analyzes carried out by Sandra, a young scientist from her unit, seem to indicate that the blood behaves like that of a living body in full digestion. Could this be a miracle cure for her mother, stricken by an odious degenerative disease? To make matters worse, Pietromarchi consults a vague acquaintance, Father Marcello, an unsavory priest, secretly erotomaniac and inveterate gamer, who embezzles the donations of his flock to repay his debt to the local mafia. The figure of the Madonna reappears in patterns scattered throughout the story, by turns discreet, suggested or diverted: through a photo of mother and child on a night table, in the care that a woman takes to her. bedridden mother, in the body of a dead child carried by her borderline brother. It is a powerful revealer of the pangs and misconduct of humans, an endocrine disruptor of the social body, its traditions, its institutions. Political stakes, family, model of the couple, all this is passed to the mill of a staggering imagery orchestrated by Niccolò Ammaniti. The management of silences, moments of emptiness where lugubriousness invites itself, makes this visual material, at the borders of the atmospheric and the vernacular, absolutely fascinating. The production, which oscillates between compositions of light, supremely academic frameworks and a surrealistic dream, metabolizes the disorders and amplifies them by choices of music drawn from a plural discography, capable of linking as much as of sublimating the images: dEUS, Tindersticks , Liquido, the dark volutes of Nils Frahm, Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Swans meet in the eye of the hurricane the lightest Vivaldi, Umberto Tozzi, Pink Martini, Gregory Porter and Jimmy Fontana. Opera, jazz and muscular rock, hell, purgatory and damnation make common flesh. Special Jury Prize and Best Male Interpretation for Tommaso Ragno (father Marcello) at the Séries Mania Festival in 2018, Il Miracolo benefits from Arte’s new broadcasting policy, which is deployed on its platforms (Arte.tv and YouTube simultaneously) the panoply of its television and web productions (Libres !, 6.30 p.m.) as well as series selected as part of a demanding and high-level program (No Man’s Land, Detectorists, The Killing). In very good company then. It is pleasant to see to what extent, two years after its first broadcast on the screens of the Franco-German channel, Il Miracolo retains, intact, all its icy relevance and its bewitching voluptuousness.
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